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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Looks like textbook “angry white man syndrome”. Just a standard boilerplate maga rant. “[i]Oh, my property taxes are too high!” “You’re spending MY money on brown people!” “I’ll close my remarks by threatening you.”[/i]

Fortunately there are more than enough good and decent people in MoCo to drown out violent screaming nutjobs like that a-hole. [/quote]

why is it maga?  i'm not maga and my property taxes have almost increased 100% in a decade or so.  why should I be happy about that.

and before you talk about home prices, we havent gotten any better services in a decade to justify 100% increase in property taxes.  51% goes to MCPS and elrich wants a special assessment on top of the increases for Capital projects.

maybe you dont care but people are fed up.  [/quote]

The fact that the county decides to raise my taxes does not mean that my property value automatically increases proportionally.

Moreover, I believe that education is vital, not just for the individual students’ futures, but for the future of our community.  I don’t mind paying taxes to ensure our kids have safe schools, a solid curriculum, and to make sure our teachers are fairly paid, including COLAs and other adjustments so that they can afford the high cost of living in this county.  What I object to is MCPS treating the county budget like their own (bottomless) piggy bank.  They embrace every educational trend and continually market themselves so that they can convince the taxpayers that “MCPS is one of the best school systems in the country” and that they are providing a “21st century education”.

I remember when I first realized how self-indulgent and profligate MCPS actually was.  I was attending a curriculum meeting during the 2008-09 school year, during the financial crisis (which certainly wasn’t raising property values), while things were still trending downhill and we didn’t yet know how just how far the economy might eventually fall, when MCPS proudly announced their new initiative to put a Promethean SMART board in every classroom.  They boasted about the assorted functions, but were flummoxed when I asked what they could do that we couldn’t already do with the current technology of the equipment that the school system already owned.  After hemming and hawing a bit, they finally realized that Promethean boards would allow teachers to annotate videos they were showing.  When I suggested that maybe we should wait a few years until the economy had stabilized before we made a significant spending commitment, my caution was dismissed, after all, they had to provide the aforementioned “21st century education”.  Later, as the Promethean boards started appearing in the classrooms, I asked my kids teachers about their experiences with the boards.  The general consensus is that while they made some functions more convenient, they were under a lot of pressure to use the bells and whistles, even in cases where the “smart” functions were less effective and efficient than simply using traditional methods.

I don’t mind paying taxes to provide a high quality education to our students, moderately generous salaries that will attract teachers to our country and allow them to live here comfortably, and assisting disadvantaged families (regardless of color) that struggle with our high cost of living.  I do object, however, to stoking the whims and egos of the MCPS administrators with my taxes.

Coming from a mid-sized district in another state, I was shocked that in “one of the best school systems in the country”, educated parents tended to either support the booming tutoring industry or teach their kids at home, and too often kids whose parents wouldn’t or couldn’t supplement education were left floundering.  Now, apparently, discipline has deteriorated to the point that bathrooms are kept locked and some classrooms have to be repeatedly evacuated because a student is having a meltdown (I’m sympathetic to a student in crisis, but if they are frequently in crisis, then they need something to change to help them, not just abandoning them to deal with their problems and then leaving the problems unaddressed).

I would like for the county to put their foot down with the MCPS budget. I want them to make it clear that if the relatively generous educational budget falls short of their desired spending, they need to start trimming the fat and focus on confining expenditures to those that directly benefit education.  [/quote]

I would vote for you for MCPS/MoCo government.  +1 to all of this.  At my MCPS middle school, we have to fundraise for enrichment and so that the teachers don't have to use their own money.  I think we all just want some accountability.  I was gobsmacked to read that the County had a surplus, but Frierson redirected the money to cronies' projects.[/quote]

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