School Budget Elections

Also my vote: NO. Across the board. These are CRACKHEADS. Do better with the money we already give you.

I used to ascribe to the typical Liberal view that public schools are good for democracy, and I still believe that uneducated parents are less able to educate their children on their own than are well educated parents. So I generally would object to the use of school-tax dollars for private-school purposes (the so-called "voucher" system) because I just viewed it as yet more undercutting of the social-welfare net that I view as necessary for a functioning society. But when I hear from school boards and many teachers, I am just stunned at the low low low ... LOW ... level of intelligence exhibited. I mean, I can't really justify sentencing young people to incarceration in schoolrooms for extended hours every day with those idiots.

School budgets in most areas never really recovered after 2008 until Covid stimmy money came in. (But the mandates from the top down didn’t skip a beat.

The double whammy is the combination of *both* “high rigor and expectations” mixed with “stop punishing kids and implement restorative justice and positive reinforcement only” ideals simultaneously. And it gets even goofier when the educational consultants who haven’t been in a classroom since the Bush Era are on the sidelines ready to evangelize the Best Way To Teach that school districts for force teachers to implement, and then implement the next fad from another consultant a few years after.Teachers need to implement all that, and yet teaching is still oriented towards standardized tests that are used against schools when students don’t do well.

And it finally took students collectively falling in test score growth year after year to get Pearson to finally knock it off and stop redesigning the tests to make them more difficult. (To perhaps encourage selling their own proprietary course materials?)

Though the stimmy funds are set to expire in September later this year. That may be tough to observe in NY though, because that state is an outlier there in how much it’s willing to spend. For better or worse, they already fund so much that it makes sense to use up what’s there on a library.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2….

But what part of the school district funding would you like to cut specifically? If there is something you want cut, then is there something federally mandated on the school districts that make it tough to get rid of that thing?

Just cut the salaries in all the teachers and go out and hire all those stay at home grandmothers to baby sit those kindergarten and first graders. We have several decades of proof how far the public tax dollars go towards salaries of primary through secondary teachers, and the results are underwhelming. If the pro-voucher movement is going to take hold, our public funds should be able to stretch out further without raising bond referendums. Grandmas 4 teachers as part of a nationwide phased retirement program! (Sic)

Our school system is in the top .06% in cost per pupil versus academic achievement nationally, so we get great value for our local tax dollars. If the State and Federal Governments ran like our town, few, if any, would complain about expenditure. Our only two issues are people moving here for the services and people gaming the system to pretend they live here for the autism program. We need to get rid of Title 9 as the rats called progressives are using it to make the mental illness called trans, part of the law. I watched my 11-year-old grandniece play hoops against a boygirl yesterday and it was a disgrace. Looked exactly as it was: A large male males little girls, although heshe had the longest hair.

It's all a matter of perspective I suppose.

I live in a county that has one of the best public school systems in the state. Our zoned schools are providing children (including mine) with a top notch education for about $8k per year per student. When they do ask for more funding, it is for something which makes sense. All of this makes me look favorably upon reasonable additional funding requests.

If I lived in a liberal enclave which pisses away $20-30k+ per student per year for poor academic outcomes, I would probably feel very differently. ROI matters. How the hell some of these areas spend so much money, yet still cannot seem to educate their kids, is mind boggling to me.

Completely unrelated to the original question, Florida has done a number of other things to make public schools better. For starters, we aren't saddled with all of the DEI curriculum nonsense. We also don't allow boys to go into girls locker rooms and bathrooms or beat up on them in our sporting events. And of course if your school is not getting the educational job done, then Florida has a robust school choice program that lets you move almost $8k per year per kid to a private school of your choice.

It's good to be someplace sane, lol.

I went to 10th grade in Florida. Wonderful year where I aced every class with no effort, having taken the curriculum in Massachusetts already.....in 7th grade.

My experience with school budgets is voting doesn't make any difference. The last time I voted, the school budget was voted down across the board. The voters clearly said, "No" to the budget. What happened next. The school district regrouped after the humiliating defeat and tweaked some of the details of the budget which was later put up for vote. The time and place for voting was not well announced. Voter turnout was low and the revised budget passed. The bottom line - the school district got about 99% of what they wanted in the original budget.

@skibum, times have changed. Florida now ranks #1 in the U.S. News and World Report in education.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/…

I went to HS in Massachusetts too, as an Honors student in a very good High School. I can tell you that the stuff my kids are doing in school now in Florida is more advanced, including a variety of specialized A/P classes and advanced math.

Even more astounding than the amazing turnaround in its public K-12 education system over the past 30 years is how great the state university system has become. So much so that most top Florida students no longer leave the state to go to college. Instead they go to schools like UF and FSU, which are now as tough to get into as just about any of the top private universities in the country outside of the Ivy League schools.

Don’t bother trying to update SkiDumb to the current situation, he’s stuck in the 60’s and 70’s listening to his Al Joston and Elvis vinyl records thinking the sound coming out of the phonograph is better than the digital music the rest of the world hears. Skidumb is the type of guy that thinks the era of the Laker’s dominating with George Mika and company was the best all time basketball team, because they were all white.

LOL Mate.

The most brilliant part is that Florida has funded this education renaissance, in part, on the backs of degenerate gamblers. In 1986, voters passed a Constitutional amendment to allow Florida to operate a state lottery for the specific purpose of funding public education. As the state population ballooned over the decades since then, so too did the lottery proceeds. Again, simply brilliant.

The lottery proceeds now go to three places: (1) K-12 education; (2) public universities; and (3) Bright Futures scholarships, which give the best and brightest a free or deeply discounted ride at any Florida public university. But even those kids who don't meet the Bright Futures eligibility standards can still go to a good Florida university for a fraction of what so-called "public" universities in other states charge for in-state tuition. Though nowadays you basically have to be a Bright Futures eligible kid to even get accepted to UF or FSU (Florida's 2 largest public universities), so if you're not then you'll be going to one of the other schools, lol.

So anyone who lives or visits Florida, I encourage you to buy your scratch offs and get your numbers picked. I and my kids thank you for your contribution. 😉

Don’t forget - the largest university (excluding Californias vast expanding multiple campuses) in the country is in Florida - UCF.

Applause for Mateswith27dead animals? I guess if I was the type to applaud the semen stain I too would put all my faith in US News and World report. If you can get into Roxbury Community College you can get into every college in Florida. Some people say "bright futures" some people say "special needs". All the same.

Which states can a taxpayer vote on the school budget? In PA, we cannot.

We do get to vote on the school board directors.

In New York it was a stand alone election in May. School board and budget. The budget got voted down more than once. But in those cases it was tweaked and another election held.

We vote for a school board. The school board prepares a budget and submits it to the board of selectmen (misogyny) they approve or disapprove. As prop 2 1/2 limited property tax increases here, if they want more money for a school budget they need to get enough signatures to put a prop. 2 1/2 override on the ballot. So far prop 2 1/2 override requests for funds to go into the general fund have failed 100% of the time. Overrides for a specific purpose (new firetruck - failed), (new high school - passed), (renovate old high school into new jr. High - passed), pass about 80% of the time and close to 100% if they are for specific school expenditures.

Recently the local school board had a huge bond that would offer something spectacular to local students. Cost to taxpayers - roughly an additional $100 per $100k value of your home.* My wife was all for it, I explained to her “do you realize the tax cost involved?” Nevermind we don’t even have any kids. She talked me into it but we both knew it would fail, and it did, spectacularly.

The culprit? The inept superintendent did an absolute horrible job presenting this to the community and couldn’t sell the project to the voters. I think it failed at an 80% clip and I live in a liberal community.

* At a Q&A the superintendent couldn’t even answer how long the increased tax would be. 5 years? 10 years? Forever? No wonder it failed.

In my district, senior citizens are exempt from school assessments on their property taxes. So I don't pay attention to the issue.

Shadowcat,

Where is your district?

@nice If I'm giving them more I want to see exactly what they need it for. And what cuts are they going to make to contribute as well. I want to see all of that on ballot when I'm making my vote. I know none of it goes to the kids, the first thing the administrators do is up their salaries it's all scam. Look at Chicago public schools they are asking for a budget of 50 billion dollar increase despite declining enrollment, failing at every level. They get raises for failure. When the kids can do math at grade level then come back to me.

Everybody bitches about taxes but almost everybody also bitches about not getting what they want from government services (including school boards). Collection of a mere 1% of all the "unpaid" (i.e. calculated on the basis of what "seems right") taxes on the super-wealthy's top bracket would easily solve all these problems.

^ Absolutely untrue. Just more progressive bullshit to punish those who contribute and reward those who do not. School systems are being crushed financially by the democrats open borders policy asking poor, illiterate foreigners to flood in and use up all the resources. If the only people who received benefits were those who deserved them, then things would be fine.

@book guy - that's not true. Forgetting for a second that everyone has a different opinion of what "seems right" and Bernie's holds no intrinsic merit over anyone else's, there aren't enough super wealthy to fund all the Democrats' pipe dreams.

Not to mention these inner city schools are some of the best resourced in the country. They are not hurting for dollars, only for students and parents who value learning.

I've become a big proponent of school choice, it seems to shape everyone up and be best for kids.

Skibum: stick to skiing and ski equipment, because your last comment on this topic sounds fucking stupid. Now go take your lipitor.

It's hilarious to me that anyone might think the ultra-wealthy are the ones who "contribute." (A little ranting about "illiterate foreigners" and the true stripes of that commenter are soon revealed.) In the past, the top marginal tax rate has been in the 90% range. But now we're letting the ultra-wealthy slide while the middle class is squeezed. The American Dream will be utterly inaccessible to entire generations thanks to nothing other than unnecessary hoarding at the top. I say take a good quarter-billion from Elon (and others), don't worry, poor little rich boy won't "suffer" with "only" a few hundred million in his pocket (and he didn't contribute JACK SHIT). If we tax fairly, much more progressively (in the technical sense) than we do now, and curtail excess government social welfare spending at the same time, we'd have the resources to fix these school problems. I do agree, the inner-city schools are already usually well-funded and abysmally managed and they often lack deeply invested parents and communities. I started out my participation in this thread by stating that I think the uneducated are worse at educating their own children than are the educated, and by hinting that I've moved toward favoring school choice, in fact (you can see my statements without even clicking; all you have to do is scroll; though this may be a challenge for an "illiterate foreigner" and a few other participants in this thread), so it's not like I disagree on all the fundamentals.

Tax the rich. Or eat them. Also the woke. There should be a rich-tax and a woke-tax. That would solve some things. You can usually identify the rich by the zeroes on their tax returns. And you can always identify the woke by their hair.

Lol.