Schools Face Big Budget Holes As Stimulus Runs Out

[Purveyor]

(02-14) 11:54 PST San Francisco (AP) --

The nation's public schools are falling under severe financial stress as states slash education spending and drain federal stimulus money that staved off deep classroom cuts and widespread job losses.

School districts have already suffered big budget cuts since the recession began two years ago, but experts say the cash crunch will get a lot worse as states run out of stimulus dollars.

The result in many hard-hit districts: more teacher layoffs, larger class sizes, smaller paychecks, fewer electives and extracurricular activities, and decimated summer school programs.

The situation is particularly ugly in California, where school districts are preparing for mass layoffs and swelling class sizes as the state grapples with another massive budget shortfall.

The crisis concerns parents like Michelle Parker in San Francisco, where the school district is preparing to lay off hundreds of school employees and raise class sizes because it faces a $113 million budget deficit over next two years.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/02/14/national/a115219S35.DTL#ixzz0fYlwH7WW

[proud2BlibKansan]

1. Extremely hard times for our schools

And bound to get rougher.

[villager]

2. I'm not sure the public school model will ever bounce back from this...

I wonder what other steps parents might take to educate their children?

[MadHound]

5. They're not meant to bounce back from this,

This is the technique of disaster capitalism being applied to our public education system. As more and more public schools go under, more and more charter schools and private schools pop up to take their place. This is accompanied by forcing vouchers and even more stringent requirements for NCLB through the government, along with other methods favorable to privatization, such as the Race to the Top funds.

This will keep the public schools prostrate, force teacher pay even lower, and dumb down generations of kids. This is at work already in this country.

The ultimate goal is to have a two tier education system. One, the privatized tier, offers your kids an education that is marginally better than the public education system that is left in place. This education will be good enough to get your child into a community college, or perhaps a state university. However it will cost you dearly. After all, education corporations, like any other corporation, exists to transfer as much wealth as possible from the bottom tiers of society to the top tier. Furthermore, in many locations they only alternative private school will be a religious one, so your child will get the bonus religious endoctrination.

The public school system will be for all the rest of the kids, taking on more developmentally and intellectually disabled kids, the poor and others from the margins of society. The education received here will be only sufficient enough to make good worker drones for the service economy.

The rich will do what they always have done, send their kids to private elite prep and boarding schools that provides top notch education, and will allow them entry into the top flight universities.

This is the future of our education system. Public schools have been under assault all of my life, almost fifty years now. This is but the final act of complete corporate takeover of our public school system, which will relegate entire generations to a piss poor education.

[ipaint]

9. Milton Freidman, the chicago school and wall street

Their laboratory experiment in Chile, with a little help from his best buddy Pinochet, set the stage for the eventual dismantling of the public commons here in the states. At 91 he was overseeing the dismantling of the public school system in New Orleans after Katrina.

It's never about what is best for kids and always about what is best for business.

[2Design]

3. large retiriement benefits and health care and high price of

developmentally challenge are high cost to schools and the NCLB cost schools large, superintendents salaries are outrageous, etc

[LWolf]

4. We faced big budget holes with stimulus dollars,

which were not enough last year to make up the difference in lost revenues. We already experienced deep cuts and job losses; 43 people in our small district lost their jobs last year, and we cut the school year by 21 days, among other program cuts.

This spring we begin work on next year's budget, with more revenue losses and the stimulus going away.

The "stimulus" dollars left aren't there to stimulate the economy. They are there to stimulate competition between states and districts to achieve a faster move towards privatization and union-busting under "Race To The Top."

[Purveyor]

6. Our district is closing the middle school next year. This district has had a "Junior High",

as it was called back then, since 1919.

The 2 elementary schools will absorb students from that closing with one school teaching to K-3 students and the other teaching 4-6 grade students.

The high school will teaching the remaining 7-12 graders.

[demtenjeep]

7. I wonder how big they think are huge class sizes

and do different grade levels make large class sizes harder?

[Historic NY]

8. Hopefully there not as stupid as our school board..........

they were able to sneak in a 3% tax on our utility bills, their justification is everyone pays utility bills. We happen to have high ones they were even charging it on fuel oil until it was overturned. They are now spending some 8.7 million dollars to build a track and other fields at a grade school that has no inter-mural sports..after spending millions on the high school and jr. high facilities. Apparently its money they didn't use in 2007. My school taxes are 1/ 1/2 times that of my town & county taxes and I have no children in school. I'm retired on disability. I can see them laying off the aides again or trying to get another 8% tax increase. It amazing how much they can waste and then complain that the state isn't giving them additional funding. The well has gone dry but they do what they want.