Reply to MCPS Should Be Ashamed

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think it's great that we're identifying so many deficits.   Clearly, there's a will to increase taxes/allocations to address them, since the 25-year underfunding of the system is what has made it so, as much as, if not more than, any mismanagement.  Run the numbers.[/quote]

Underfunding???? What are you smoking?[/quote]

Again, run the numbers.  Check the budget per student and compare that to whichever district you'd like to emulate.

Look at the budget requests for the past quarter-century, and then look at the eventual County Council appropriation, which has consistently under-funded the requests.  Check into all the ever-delayed/deferred facility projects that have resulted.  Imagine the extra maintenace coats for older infrastructure that come with those delayed capital projects.

Identify the impact of sweetheart-deal-to-developer exceptions to impact taxes.  Research the near giveaways of county educational property to private purposes that could have supported better current capacity.

Digest a of this with a reminiscent clip of Sam Seaborn on education from 23 years ago.  Still rings true.  Too bad we've apparently chosen other priorities.[/quote]

DP.
Perhaps everything that specifically impacts the classroom is underfunded, but MCPS definitely has plenty of money. I’d be more sympathetic if central office salaries and initiatives didn’t suck up so much of the funding. I suspect we could get rid of 3/4 of central office and the schools wouldn’t even notice.[/quote]

I mean, sure, fine.  Go after central.  Go after potential mismanagement.  I'm not saying there couldn't be any of that.

How does that get done?  Oversight.  Which costs $.  The BOE for this enormous enterprise gets part-time stipends for what should be a more-than-full-time job.  And they'd need an independent staff to make it work.

And the costs, there, along with any potential savings from resulting proper management/identification & claw-back of graft (but not from contractors, of course -- their contracts tend to protect them) are small in comparison to the budget, whereas the underfunding is, and has been, large

Or you could throw up your hands in a self-serving way, claim the mismanagement based on not much more than the top-line budget number ("Look!  A number with a 'B'!  They have a show about that, and those people are mean and certainly don't deserve their vast wealth!") not bothering to check to see if the per-student amount is reasonable in comparison to whichever A+ district you cherry-pick, say, "See! Government waste of our tax dollars!," campaign for de-funding of public schools and for private school vouchers that decimate public economies of scale and overwhelmingly serve those of means in the first place, and loudly complain in later years about how society is full of undereducated ne'er-do-wells, so we need to spend money on law enforcement.

:roll: [/quote]

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