No matter where you go in OC, local schools and school districts are feeling the pain of hard times. In Capistrano Unified, Coastal South County schools are preparing for $27 million in painful budget cuts. Santa Ana Unified is preparing to possibly lay off some 573 teachers in the 2008-09 school year. In Saddleback Valley (Inland South County), some 170 teachers may be laid off. Basically, the pain’s being felt everywhere.
So why all the pain and suffering in our local schools? Is it just incompetence and the wasting of our tax dollars on the part of administration? Is Capo making a HUGE mistake by giving Superintendent A. Woodrow Carter a $324,000 salary (with benefits)? Is Santa Ana just wasting all the bond money that voters keep approving for the district on admin salaries?
Or can it be more than just that? Is it also a problem of the State of California being unwilling to fully fund Prop 98 funds for our schools? Is it a state problem in shying away from the necessary tax reforms to keep the state budget (including education) afloat? Is the state budget crisis finally trickling down to our local schools?
What do you think about the state of our schools today? Why can’t we fully fund our kids’ education? Is this a local problem of administrative incompetence? Is this a state problem of imprudent budgeting? Or is this a combination of the two?
I want to hear what you have to say about all the cuts at all our schools. Why are we feeling all this pain? Go ahead and have your say.
My brother and future sister in law are both middle school teachers. It is appalling to find out how much administrators are making when teachers are trying to eck out a measly living. Above that, they are both considering changing career paths because teachers are allowed to teach the curriculum but are required to teach to a standardized test. And every year their school boards decide to dictate a new way in which teachers will have to teach their material, all in the hopes of bettering standardized test scores. We’re so wrapped up in meeting quotas set by a goverment thousands of miles across the country that we’ve shifted focus away from the students and the teachers
correction: teachers aren’t allowed to teach the curriculum
Vanessa-
I’m so sorry to hear about your brother and future sister-in-law. Oh yes, and you’re making a good point in mentioning what I forgot to mention in the story: THE FEDERAL COMPONENT. For 6 years, we’ve had the unfunded mandate known as “No Child Left Behind”. While NCLB was SUPPOSED to give schools throughout the nation additional funding while holding schools accountable, we’ve had neither. Instead, we have the feds telling local schools what they’re supposed to do and how many standardized tests they’re supposed to give our kids… But these schools are NOT getting enough money to actually educate students. Sad, isn’t it?
Oh yes, and another good point on administration. What’s with these wildly high salaries for Superintendents while the teachers scrape by to survive? Personally for me, I see the problem as a combination of these 3 components: The federal government mandates all these tests but don’t provide enough support to help kids actually LEARN, while the state government can’t fix our regressive tax structure that allows the super-rich and large corporations off the hook while middle class families are squeezed by all these “rate increases” that don’t do enough to close the budget gap… And yes, there’s also a local component of so much mismanagement of so little funds by admin. So what can we do? Where do we start to fix this mess?