You may have missed it but legislation is working it’s way through Tallahassee that will give school districts the ability to sell advertising on busses and have corporate sponsors for their cafeterias. Can you imagine it, busses looking like Nascar cars and the Chic-Filet dining hall?
Why is this legislation coming to a school near you? Well schools are broke and our leaders in Tallahassee would rather keep tax breaks on yachts, bottled water and dozens of other things; because our leaders would rather save the money they have to give away to businesses to move here because our incredibly low tax rate and lack of an income tax isn’t doing the trick and because our leaders want to stay away from taxing internet purchases and to continue to allow travel companies to skirt our tax laws, than chip in a little more for education.
You are probably saying, “hey wait a minute our benevolent leader has called to add an additional billion to education and that’s a good thing.” Well on its surface it might sound like it is but when we did a bit deeper it’s easy to see how disingenuous his request really is.
Florida is expected to have thirty thousand additional students next year costing a few hundred million dollars more and then there is the couple hundred million used to offset lower tax revenues, he life blood of education. The truth is there is a modest raise coming unfortunately it won’t offset the loss of federal money that most districts are going to experience. People complain about the stimulus here in Florida but the government soaked it up for the last few years. The per pupil spending will go from 6,230 to 6,372 or basically what we spent in 1976. The thing is do we really want to take from sick kids and grandma, which is where the money will come from to finance the additional couch change?
I get it though, times are tough, why shouldn’t kids in public school sacrifice and lets put our blinders on and ignore the tens of millions the state is pumping into defacto publicly funded private corporate welfare schools, though the legislature calls them charter schools, the loss of tax revenues to vouchers and the love affair they are having with for profit virtual schools and have our kids roll up their sleeves and sacrifice like the rest of us.
This however is the thing that gets me. Any money school districts get from the Target Bus or the Burger King Cafeteria can’t be spent on what the districts believe their needs are. No friends the state legislature run by supposedly “home rule” republicans have further stripped control away from local school boards and have dictated how the money must be spent. The chutzpa of these guys, the hubris they have to tell districts how to spend their money to educate their children. They are treating our local elected leaders like children incapable of allocating the extra nickels these bills might bring in. That’s what gets me.
Not how they have violated the constitution, which says it, is the paramount duty of the state to provide all our children with a high quality education and for good measure the legislature gutted the class size amendment last year too. Not how they would rather fill the pockets of special interests, testing companies, hedge fund managers, and real estate moguls, you know those who are heavily investing in charter schools and virtual schools, with the money they don’t give to the legislators reelection accounts, than give schools money to fix roofs and air conditioners. Not how they diverted the lottery funds away from where it was supposed to go, somehow the legislature confused the words augment and replace, they probably didn’t pay attention that day in school.
No what gets me is they are treating us like children. They are insulting us. I expect them to divert money and marginalize our priorities because they have been doing so for years but up until recently they had the decency to at least pretend and in a soothing voice tell me that liquid running down my leg was rain. Now they don’t even pretend. Now they aim for our faces.
Hey Florida Legislature and Rick Scott why stop with busses and cafeterias, lets have people pay to name schools to. Rick Scott middle has a ring to it doesn’t it
No comments:
Post a Comment