Juicing the Turnips

It has been a hot topic in my household as of late, with both my fiancee and I becoming teachers in just one short year, we've been paying close attention to the educational budget cuts going on in the state. I've been hearing about it from all sorts of different media, the television, news papers and even the radio, and as bad as they make it seem, I still wasn't prepared for the numbers crunch when I checked out the facts for myself. 

One of Rick Scott's campaign strategies, like most politicians, was to express the desire to protect education while still managing to cut the state wide spending budget. In this respect I say that as our governor, he has failed miserably. His plans for cutting back our budget fall largely on those employees and our students.

One of his recent propositions, another of his campaign strategies, was to reduce property taxes. This reduction in property taxes will equate to approximately $44.72 per average homeowner according to an article by Dara Kam in the Palm Beach Post. This sounds like a decent plan, a small help but  help nonetheless to those paying taxes on their homes, but consider where this cut will come from when the new school year begins. This $44.72 per household cut will be made up by cutting $2,335 per year from the average teacher's salary. A beginning teacher makes roughly $40,000 a year as it is.

But the fun doesn't stop there. 

Another solution, applicable to county employees and school district personnel as well as teachers, would be for them to start contributing to their retirement. This would be another 5% pay cut in teacher salary each year, bringing it down a whopping 10%.

Also take into consideration that our teachers, our school systems, are ranked 7th in the nation, an A-, on the 2008 Quality Counts report from EdWeek Magazine. This same report, from 2008, also gave us an F on our school spending. Teachers are doing their jobs, they just aren't being recognized for it.

This is a bleak outlook from where I stand as a future teacher. Most teachers have not received a pay raise in over 3 years and they have been stripped of their tenure, which was the only job security they had; their pay is now going to be based on how well their students perform, though as you read in my previous blog there seems to be no funding for that endeavor, and now they must take a 10% pay cut to support a homeowners tax cut, which will be of largest benefit to the wealthy. 

Desperation is eking into our school system. In some counties schools are pooling their resources to support ESE students, which also means they are pooling their ESE students which works against inclusion. For most schools it is now cheaper to pay the fine for being over the class size limit than to try to fit inside it's strict boundaries, not for lack of trying, but for lack of funding. THey have discussed cutting arts and sports from schools as well to make up the deficit, which would further promote the dropout rate in my opinion because we already know that compulsory education isn't all that popular with struggling students, so taking away their one enjoyment from school would only seal the deal. 

There are a multitude of other places that the government could be cutting from, their spending for one, is ludicrous. We've all seen what they eat for lunch on our tax dollars. Prisons will soon be receiving more funding than our school system, which gives you an idea as to where they think we're headed. 

As I said in my very first post, I am not a politician, nor do I pretend to be an expert in this area, but as a future teacher and a future parent, I think I would choose the future of our children and the support of our teachers over cheesecake and inmates.