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Educational funding overhaul needed
Published Friday, February 5, 2010
We find ourselves at an interesting point in our city’s, our state’s and our country’s history. Here we are, wanting to please two masters, with the inability to serve either well.
When it comes to properly funding education in our country, we find ourselves working off a broken system, a system slowed by bureaucracy, special interests, bloated systems and unrealistic expectations.
We ask our teachers to be among the best in the world, while providing them third-world support. We challenge our students to perform at high levels, while tying them down with inadequate funding and low-level support.
On Thursday, Suffolk Public School superintendent Dr. Milton Liverman released a preliminary budget for the upcoming fiscal years. It portrayed a bleak financial picture of funding for our school system and provided no increases in programs, no increases in funding of initiatives and no increase in teacher pay.
And, the one caveat to the proposed budget that raised the most concern is that our school leaders were asked to lay out a budget plan without fully knowing just how much they would receive in local or state funding.
In recent months we have challenged our school leaders to examine every expenditure down to the penny. We have challenged them to look at every administrative salary, validate every perk or fluff in the budget. And, we have asked that every savings found, every penny picked up out of the parking lot, be reinvested into the classroom, into teacher salaries and advanced programs.
We can no longer ask our teachers, our schools or our children to give us world class results without finding ways to give them world class support.
Our education funding system is broken. For a better American future, we must find a way to fix it.
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Comments
Posted by OD (anonymous) on February 6, 2010 at 5:21 a.m. (Suggest removal)
The sad state of our primary schools is the result of government interference. Bloated local and state governments combined with corrupt unions and incompentent adminstrators with liberal thinking are hurting our children. Local schools are expensive and full of waste, fraud and abuse. If we modeled our primary schools after our university systems with a combination of competing public, private and parochial schools, this competition would improve the education of our children.
Posted by 7l (anonymous) on February 8, 2010 at 8:49 a.m. (Suggest removal)
OD: As a teacher I would like to thank you for your continued support of my efforts. I am truly motivated when I learn that some citizens in Suffolk considered me to be wasteful, fraudulent and abusive.
Posted by OD (anonymous) on February 13, 2010 at 7:53 a.m. (Suggest removal)
71? Where is the implication that was directed to teachers? I have been and will continue to support the teachers. am who is teacher knows my stance and history regarding teachers. Dont let the dust from the eraser cloud your mind.
Posted by OD (anonymous) on February 13, 2010 at 8:40 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Remember the good ol’ days when children were “seen and not heard” (due to our lack of life experience) because we had little to offer an adult conversation. Today’s young people will get in our faces and authoritatively tell us what THEY think, which is why I have and will continue to remind them of their place and why.
Seeing how we as parents and teachers support most of them, young people might want to be very careful about who they talk down to. Imagine what would happen if WE said, “____ you!”
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