School Budget Elections
Muddy
USA
Do you vote in them? One thing about the area I live in is that EVERYBODY bitches about taxes, particularly property taxes and yet when the school budget election comes around, new bigger budgets get approved for the library and the school district, every. single. year. Without fail.
I hardly see anybody at things anyway when I go I doubt even 10% eligible voters even votes. Presidential yeah yeah you'll see lines, governor year yeah that one too but otherwise nobody knows or if they do even bothers to go to these things. While this is probably the biggest opportunity you will have all year at reigning in the property taxes.
I hardly see anybody at things anyway when I go I doubt even 10% eligible voters even votes. Presidential yeah yeah you'll see lines, governor year yeah that one too but otherwise nobody knows or if they do even bothers to go to these things. While this is probably the biggest opportunity you will have all year at reigning in the property taxes.
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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?
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.
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.
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. 😉
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.
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.
Where is your district?
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.
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.