California is not the heartland

We have had such amazing experiences since moving out of California. The term "heartland" for the midwest always struck me as a cliche (being from liberal, progressive California). But I am beginning to get it. 

California is an incredibly wealthy state. South Dakota is less so. Californians flaunt their wealth. South Dakotans use it. I have yet to see an Escalade here. But the schools all have libraries. And librarians. Most families live in homes that are under 2000 square feet in our new home town. But the schools have computer labs. And computer teachers. 

Attending an IEP team meeting in California, the team made a recommendation for an assistive technology device, and our program specialist squirmed. She claimed she could not recommend the device because she did not have the authority to authorize to make the purchase. (Even with attorneys present she could not bring herself to comply with the law without reservation). 

At an IEP team meeting here, the special education director asked questions like, "Do we need to purchase a device for her?" and "What training do we as a team need to get ready for her?Should we hire a consultant to train us or will the state department of education be able to provide training through their assistive technology group?" (FYI, California's state DOE does not have an AT group).

In California, the smallest of obstacles for providers becomes a mountain too tall to scale, too big to go around. Even though there is a staggering amount of money flowing through the economy there (Gary Eberhardt said they spend 68 million dollars on 4000 special education students  per year) they can't seem to make that money work. There are fewer than half that number of people in this entire town. Yet here they manage to fund their schools, keep libraries, computers, art, music, AND bus their special education students to town each week for adaptive aquatics. No one in the school district is afraid to comply with IDEA or ADA because compliance is too expensive.

Of course, my in laws drive a late model domestic mini-van (which, horrors, has a dent in the fender), cut their own lawn (1/4 of an acre) and take most of their meals at home, rather than ordering or going out. 

I wonder where all the money comes from?

A Modest Solution

Our board members will be forced into the untenable, miserable position of having to make additional cuts to the MDUSD budget. I do not envy their position, nor the pressure they will feel from panicked parents who see our infrastructure crumble in front of our eyes. As a parent of three children, one with disabilities, I feel this pull and tug daily. Yet the child I represent at board meetings, state budget meetings and in the community is my child with a disability. If you have a child with a disability, you know why. The threat that all children face now is not new to us. Our kids cost more. That is reason enough for resentment. 

Here are some objections and refuting talking points I am keeping in mind as I work with the board, neighbors, friends and legislators to advocate for our students and help others 'walk a mile in our kids walkers.'

The first and most important point is this. We are a community. Either we serve students with disabilities or we hang a sign at the district border that says "We don't serve your kind here." If we do decide to do the right thing, the civilized and ethical thing, then we should do it with as much pride as we do, say, football, band, robotics, and Honors courses. Right now we are uncommitted. We have parents irate that students might have to pay a fee to play extracurricular sports. At the same time, some of our students have to sit on the sidelines at recess because they cannot get to the play structures. We have a district that has spent tens of thousands of dollars in court, losing the argument that playgrounds don't have to be accessible to all students.Where are the indignant parents speaking for the disabled? Arguing that special education costs too much, not crying that those kids can't play. What does the board say? Nothing in defense of our kids, no apology for the playground structures, no shame at the fiscal waste. 

1. Misconception: We need to cut spending. The governor and Republican minority claim we can cut spending and get out of the budget crisis. This is a revenue problem, not a spending problem. A majority of voters locally and throughout the state support tax increases. School districts have cut to the bone. The state needs to raise more money for the services we, proudly and rightly provide our citizens. We used to be an educational leader, now our per student spending matches our test scores: lowest in the country. If we want a first class educational system, we need to spend at least as much as New York. That would require doubling our per pupil spending and place us roughly in the top third of states.  Until then, we get what we pay for. 
   
2. Misconception: Special education is too expensive! Parents of regular education students have noticed that special education takes up 23% of the total budget. At about 11% of the total population, that means our kids with special needs are roughly twice as expensive as regular ed kids. Actually, 2:1 expenses is a really good ratio. While we have some students who require minimal services, I know that many children are more severe. Mine for instance has an aide, a nurse, and occupational therapist, speech therapist, assitive technology specialist, physical therapist, computer and a class of eight. Her education is more than 10 times what her sister costs the district. We have managed to keep our program costs reasonably low and our services for special education students are something we should be as proud of as our sports and Advanced Placement services. 
   
3. Partial truth: There is a lot of fraud, waste and abuse in special education! The district should be forthcoming about waste and abuse. It has spent significant sums of money in court fighting  students' rights. The money now allocated to resurface playgrounds is an example. Had those been properly installed, or had the district remedied the improper installation at the request of the Spieler class rather than going to court to appeal, that money wasted would now be available to hire teachers. The district should be as compliant with law as possible; it is the right, and least expensive thing to do.

Systematic abuse, not excessive service for disabled students, is the norm. Remember the nineties and early 2000's? Gosh, life was good! Unemployment was low, housing prices were rising fast, the governor still had seven Hummers. That was the economic context under which the consent decree in our district came into being. When money was flowing and business was booming, the district was forced to admit systematically violating the rights of students with disabilities. They agreed under a consent decree monitored by the federal court to set aside 20 million dollars over ten years-- a scant 2 million a year-- to remedy their ways. During the consent decree they managed to waste additional money fighting students with disabilities, wasting staggering sums of money and then having to do what the law required anyway. Now that times are bad, they say they cannot afford to special education. What's new? The Nazi's used this same propaganda to incite support of forced sterilization and euthanasia of the disabled. No one ever wants to spend money on children with disabilities. That is why we have IDEA and ADA. Otherwise, we might eat our young when we got hungry enough. 

Lest we forget

Recently in my home school district members of the board have been rallying to "study special education" to make sure it is "cost effective." Members of the community, alarmed by the violent cuts proposed to the education budget by our so called governor have been calling for cuts to special education.

How predictable that under stress communities would go after the weak and disabled as scapegoats. This same community that twice has refused to tax itself to pay for the education our own children. Are our citizens taking their torches and pitchforks out to the homes of the baby boomers who have benefitted from prop 13 all these years? Many of them paying less in property taxes all year than many of our young families pay in mortgage each month? Are they going after the governor, who proposed the cuts, or our Republican legislators who have taken a blood oath to not raise any new revenue, no matter what? Do they think that, maybe, under the circumstances that athletes could pay for extra curricular activities so that children with disabilities could have nurses, aides to change their diapers or speech therapy?

No, they go after children with disabilities. "Get the gimps! They cost to damn much!"

Americans after WWII love to vilify the Nazis. What has always scared me about Nazi Germany is not how alien it is, but how human they were, how recognizable. In that great Christian democracy (yes, Hitler appealed to Christians, especially Protestants, AND he was elected. Look it up) in that great democracy, when times got hard and Germans were standing in bread lines, it was the disabled they went after first. The tens of thousands of people with disabilities who were murdered were just the rehearsal for the Jewish Holocaust. They are not even remembered. And, it began here, in the States, in California. What scares me about Nazi Germany is how human they were, and how human we all still are. 

The following is from the National Holocaust Museum site:

Popular films such as Das Erbe ("Inheritance") helped build public support for government policies by stigmatizing the mentally ill and the handicapped and highlighting the costs of care. School mathematics books posed such questions as: "The construction of a lunatic asylum costs 6 million marks. How many houses at 15,000 marks each could have been built for that amount?" (emphasis added).

Nazi Germany was not the first or only country to sterilize people considered "abnormal." Before Hitler, the United States led the world in forced sterilizations. Between 1907 and 1939, more than 30,000 people in twenty-nine states were sterilized, many of them unknowingly or against their will, while they were incarcerated in prisons or institutions for the mentally ill. Nearly half the operations were carried out in California. 

A last thought from EUGENE V. DEBS

"Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life. We were taught under the old ethic that man's business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked; ''Am I my brother's keeper?'' That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.

Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death."

Low Incidence Funding

Taking care of students with low incidence disabilities is, well, expensive. And school districts labor under the weight of the expense. (IDEA funding is really important!) Recently our board president mentioned that the special education budget is a quarter of the whole annual budget. This figure surprised me, since our special education population is 13% (roughly) of our total population. So? How is that good?

So that means for our district SpED kids are only twice as expensive as kids in regular education. 

I actually know my kid is far more than twice as expensive. And I want to support our school to support her, and my two typically developing kids too. As they close schools and libraries and fire hard working employees and cut athletics and electives, I feel the anger as much as anyone, and some guilt that my child with a disability does not get enough funding to support my district's services to her. Services which are and ought to be protected by law. No one would school her without the law, as history already has shown. 

Low incidence disabilities are defined by California law to be "hearing impairments, vision impairments, severe orthopedic impairments, or any combination thereof".  In our district, that is a lot of kids. We have a whole program for kids with hearing impairments, visual impairments and several special day classes that serve kids with severe orthopedic handicaps. 

Low incidence kids receive low incidence funds to help with specialized equipment and services such as specialized books, materials, and equipment and services such as interpreters, note takers, readers, transcribers, and others.

That's great right? 

Wait until you see the funding formulae:

Local agencies (districts and SELPAs) that serve 25 or fewer students who have low incidence disabilities will receive base funding of $2,000, plus $29.85 per student. Such SELPAs are designated as “sparse” and are eligible to apply for additional funding to serve students with low incidence disabilities. SELPAs serving 26 or more students who have low incidence disabilities will receive base funding of $5,000, plus $29.85 per pupil. 

I'll guess that we are not a sparse SELPA, so notice that there is no provision for additional funding for us. Still, isn't $5000/26 + 29.85 kind of, well, enough? 

If we had 26 kids, that would be $222.16 per kid. With more kids, it is less per kid since the $5000 is divided among the total. So, how much does a kid with low incidence disability need? 

I'll take my kid for an example. Did I mention that with her new computer she is doing grade level work? That they discovered she can read? She can add and subtract? Here are some of her needs as annual expenses that are above and beyond what her sisters need:

• $30,000  a full time assistant to help with toileting, feeding and choking precautions, seizure management and computer work
  
• $900 (amortized over three years) for a positioning chair for feeding and computer work
  
• ?? bussing to her school, not our neighborhood school, which has no program for her
  
• $15,000 (amortized over five years and shared among three students) an eye gaze accessible computer for math, reading, spelling, science, social studies 
• ?? and associated software
• $50,000 nurse (shared among several kids) to administer seizure medications (required by laws lobbied for by the California School Nurses Association, not medically necessary)
• special day class (reduced class size, increased teacher cost)
• $150 Head pointer for painting, drawing and art

So the good news? The head pointer was covered.

The bad news? Kids are being left behind. Schools in California are shamefully underfunded and the governor's budget this year is a travesty, a cruelty, an abomination. But things would be so much better if IDEA were fully funded and if everyone had a realistic idea of what special education really costs. 

It is not that special education is horribly inefficient and wasteful, it is really that there are quite a few kids with extraordinary needs that are very expensive. 

So, as I have said many times before, it is a choice. Do we or do we not support special education? Because support means fund. As in provide for the support of, as in provide material support for. Not cheer from the sidelines, not be a fair weather fan. Not claim to love "those beautiful kids" and support their rights to a free and appropriate education and then complain about how expensive FAPE is and look to cut the budget. not say one thing and do another. 

Not to act all shocked and appalled that special education costs twice what regular ed does when you KNOW how much it costs. Exactly. 

Did I mention my daughter can read? How much would it be worth to you to discover that about your eight year old child, who had not been able to talk since she was 19 months? What would you pay to get a Valentine's card that she wrote specially for you, herself, on her computer? What would you pay to hear your eight year old for the the first time EVER you heard I LIKE MOM? What would you pay? 

Support the child, fund special education. They are worth it. If you don't think so, come meet my child, then tell me so. 

Here is a template for writing in support of the IDEA funding in the stimulus packet, up for a vote this week in the senate. You can copy and paste this text, customize it and email it to your senator, the links are in the side bar on this page. Include personal stories, information about how special education supports your child and family, and PICTURES if you have them.

California and a few other states may attempt to reduce general fund allocations to special education in the amount it receives in new IDEA funding. I included language about this in paragraph two below.

Our California senators are both democrats, and expected to support the bill, but they can use your arguments, information and pictures as they discuss this with colleagues on the other side of the aisle and try to rally the needed votes. In my personal letter, I will include images of my child using her (very expensive) speech device and a list of people employed in her program as well as information about cuts under consideration in our district. Here is a generic template.

Please feel free to share your revisons in posted comments.
__________________________________________

Honorable Senators Feinstein and Boxer,

I am writing in support of the funding for IDEA in the stimulus packet. In spite of objections from the republican party that special education funding will not stimulate the economy, I know from personal experience that it will. Special Education provides jobs for teachers, classroom assistants, custodians, bus drivers, nurses, therapists and many others. In fact, if we are trying to create jobs, restoring funding here will provide more jobs here than in regular education because of the number of services and small classes needed by special education students. In addition, fully funding IDEA now, for the first time since the initial authorization, will allow states and local agencies to use unrestricted funds to rehire teachers and staff laid off in the current economic crises.

I encourage you to continue to support this bill and to extend my appeal, on behalf of my child, to your colleagues and friends in the republican party. Like the republican party members, I want to be sure that this package does have a stimulus effect. Please include language that prohibits states from reducing existing contributions to special education if they receive new IDEA funding.

Jobs are stimulus, and our communities are experiencing huge layoffs in education as school districts struggle to balance budgets slashed by mid-year budget cuts. Keeping teachers, classroom assistants, nurses, bus drivers and therapists employed will slow the foreclosures in our community and keep people out of the unemployment lines.

Please, for our community, for our country and for my child, implore the republicans to join you in funding IDEA now. It is not just right to finally keep this long unkept promise, it is the right time.

Thank you for your service to our country.

FUND IDEA IN THE STIMULUS PACKAGE!

I received this from a friend via email and am posting as is. Get moving people! Go go go!

Call to Action—Support IDEA Special Education Funding in Federal Stimulus Package

Congress is currently considering legislation that would provide a massive influx of funding for special education programs. In addition to proposed increases to Title I, School Construction, Educational Technology, and other noneducation programs, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would provide an unprecedented $13.6 billion nationally for IDEA. Of that amount, California would receive more than 10%—or $1.36 billion!

Both the House and Senate are slated to vote on the proposal in the coming days. Your voice needs to be heard! In addition to alerting superintendents and board members in your SELPA, we urge you to do two things:

Call your local legislator and ask him/her to call his/her Congressional Representative and urge support for this funding.
Call and write your local Congressional member and ask him/her to vote for this funding.

This is a ROUGH estimates on what the school districts in your SELPA would receive if the funding is approved.

Share this information with parents in your community and coordinate telephone trees to contact members of Congress to urge support of increased funding for special education.

if the army had to hold a bakesale

I was thinking of a protest slogan from the Vietnam War era, "Wouldn't it be great if our schools had all the money they needed and the military had to hold a bakesale to buy a bomber?" when I attended the school board meeting this week. 

Special Education parents had rallied to discuss the many items on the list of budget reductions that included firing nurses, occupational therapists, speech therapists, classroom aides,  and others.  

The JROTC program was also on the reductions list-- to reduce the army officer teachers to two, and combine the 100 students into two classes. (That may sound like a lot of students per teacher, but most high school teachers-- math, English, science, history etc-- see over 120 students daily.) The JROTC staff had really helped the students to organize and prepare for the meeting, bringing in community members, family and students to speak very passionately in favor of the program.  They had speakers address the board for nearly an hour. 

Somehow in all of this, the special education parents who came to speak were shuffled to the end of the meeting and their time was cut from three minutes each to one minute each.  It seemed like an accidental oversight or mistake, but it really felt that we, that our children, mattered less. It did not help that Mr. Eberhardt, the board president, told every special ed speaker to "wrap it up." 

One of the JROTC staff said, "We are not here to recruit your children... this is a leadership program. We could have used the McDonald's model. But we used the Army model." Yes, but if the program did use the McDonald's model, the Army wouldn't  pay for it. Why? Uh, well, it is a recruitment program.  

Why is this a special education topic? 

The Army funds the JROTC at 50%. The federal government does not fund IDEA (the Individuals with Disabilities in Special Education Act) to even the mandated 40% level that Congress wrote into the law. 

For this posting I am putting aside all of my rants about the Army reducing its own IQ standard to increase recruiting for the current wars, the ACLUs public position that U.S. military recruiting practices among minors violates international laws,  and my convictions that Kurt Hahn and James Williams were right, there is a moral equivalent to war;  all my reasons for thinking the military does not belong in schools at all. 

For this post, my question is: given the sheer size of the military budget, and the drastic state of educational funding, should the army kick in the other fifty percent for JROTC? Why is our district paying for a military recruitment program at all? If the program is that valuable to to the army, then let them fund it. 

Or at least they could help the special education department hold a bake sale. They do a lot of community service, and what a great photo op for the army's new humanitarian image to have those handsome, uniformed cadets helping my daughter in her wheelchair as she tries to sell cupcakes outside the district office! 

I've noticed the army still has not had to hold their own bakesale. 

Is there a moral equivalent to war? It just might be funding IDEA, maybe even 50%. 

California's deep cuts to SpED

The governor that recalled a governor because the budget in California was not balanced cannot balance the budget. Things have become incredibly chaotic under the Governator than they ever were under Pete Wilson. 

Just last week, school districts, which compose their budgets for the 08-09 school year in June (six months ago), were told that they had to make additional cuts for this year. That means they have to figure out how to unspend money already spent. This after making deep cuts for the current year last spring. (Confused? That is because the whole process does not make sense-- does your paycheck get revised after it is in the bank?)

 

Who is in charge up there? Why are Californians not storming the capitol? 

 

What this means in the real world, not the land of magical thinking that Schwatzenager seems to occupy, is that classes are being combined mid-year, assistants, nurses, speech therapists are being fired mid-year and schools that somehow managed to hang onto music and athletics are losing them mid-year. One child said to the board: It seems like we just got music back, and now you are taking it away again! 

 

Last night, our board had to figure out how to make an additional 16 million dollars worth of cuts. Line by line, they went through the budget. News flash! Education is not a huge wasteful enterprise, not some pork barrel project. It is actually a pretty lean, efficient system. Well, lean. It would be more efficient with more money, actually.  So, line by line, the community looked for the corporate jet and the martini lunches, the tax sheltered golf games, the trips to conferences at exotic resorts. They just are not there. The corporate holiday party for teachers at my child's school was a box of fudge and a thank you card brought by parents and a pot luck lunch brought by teachers.  

So what they cut is jobs.

And how is laying off all of these people-- groundskeepers, custodians, carpenters, music teachers, coaches, occupational therapists, speech therapists, nurses, teachers' aides-- how exactly does that help our state economy? Now we have more people needing unemployment, in danger of losing their homes... how does that help? 

 

The mantra of the right that we have a spending problem is just getting to threadbare. The whole party wants to patch the holes in their seats. They don't seem to realize they are wearing the emperor's clothes and there is nothing to patch.

 

As a California home owner (there are still some left) our family pays less in property taxes than the state pays per year to educate two typically developing children. We have three kids, one with special needs. Those taxes need to also cover water systems, fire services, hiway patrol, 911. In short, we make a profit on our taxes and our state government. 

 

We do NOT have a spending problem. We have a revenue problem.  MORE NEW TAXES!

 

Congratulations to the right-- you have finally managed to cripple the finest public education system ever built.  The only system ever attempt to educate all it's citizens regardless of race, class, religious affiliation, gender or disability; to attempt to educate all citizens equally; to invest in social mobility and cultivate talent from every sector of society is now on it's knees, thanks to your strangle hold on funds and your anti-education agenda. Your loathing for this great equalizer has finally born fruit. The schools that can actually educate function only because they are supported by wealthy PTAs and private foundations, while the schools attended by poor and working class families are falling apart. Parents of typically developing children are calling for cuts to special education. One parent described what is happening to our district as "death by a thousand cuts." 

 

I suppose next spring you'll be complaining about test scores and blaming children, parents and teachers for those too. I blame you. I know how hard those teachers work, and how much time we spend on homework and at board meetings. Now you, the legislature, need to do your part. We need more teachers, smaller classes, more supplies and enough money to heat the buildings. Oh-- that stuff is not free. 

Shame, shame, shame on us for letting the legislature get away with this. Let's take the week off, hop on those district funded jets, go up to the capitol and demand a rescue package for our school system. And afterwards, we can go out for cocktails and plan our next golf vacation...

For more on this issue, see the article in the SF Chronicle: 

http://sfgate.com/cgi?file=/c/a/2009/01/14/MNS4159KA4.DTL

Fighting over scraps

Our local school board, as many will be, is considering deep cuts to special education. Parents of regular educations students are chaffing at the rights protected by law that disabled children have. They do not realize that these rights are protected because forty years ago, a child like mine would not be allowed in school at all. 

This is a copy of the open letter I wrote to our board. 

Special education is expensive, as you and caregivers of children with special needs know. However, it is lean, not wasteful. It is expensive locally because special education has already taken a forty percent cut from the federal government. It is not special education that encroaches on the general fund, it is the federal government that encroaches on education as a whole. Please do not continue to refer to our children or their programs as "encroachments". This blames them for a problem that they did not create and over which they have no control. It is inflammatory and insulting language that disguises the true problem. 

I would ask you to be careful as you lead this community. When resources are scarce, and leadership is willing to play on people's weaknesses and fears, people will protect their own at the expense of others. Very few people rescued disabled people during the holocaust. Even in our own New Orleans, gravely ill and disabled people in hospital were euthanized before they were rescued.  Every one is pro-life and pro-child in public, but the terrible truth is that most people wish my child were not here. The easier and more polite way to say this is to demand that she get less money, fewer services and be less of an "encroachment" on more able bodied, promising children. I know that it is easier to say this than to admit that few care if she lives or dies. 

If I had any wish, it would be that she were whole and healthy. I wish for a cure for Rett Syndrome. But there is none now, and we play the hand we are dealt. So instead, I wish for speech generating devices, a nurse who is on campus when she does have a seizure, a teacher who can inspire her to learn, and do her best, even in her daily pain. I wish for friends on campus who know her name, and invite her to play. For the simple joy of being a child in a community that embraces her and does not blame her for the burden that her disability is. 

Thank you for making some of our smaller wishes for her come true. As small as they are, they may be the only ones she ever gets. That our community sacrifices for her and others like her is to our honor; society is judged by how it cares for its weakest and most vulnerable members. 

I hope that you care-- and that you choose wisely. We are not yet on a rooftop in New Orleans. The levies have not yet broken. I do not have to choose between my children, or between yours and mine. 

Warmest Regards, 

Gina Hale, mother to Emma, age 8

Autism and epilepsy

According to National Institutes for health, nearly one third of people with autism have epilepsy. This is the case with my daughter, and some of her friends as well. 

Epilepsy is a poorly understood phenomenon among the general public, and for many people, witnessing seizures is frightening. We have had enormous difficulty finding day care for our child because most sitters and agencies are fearful-- not unprepared-- to handle a child with epilepsy.

The current policy in California's education code, which requires a licensed nurse to administer Diastat during a seizure and prohibits non-licensed persons (including first responders) from giving it, increases the stigma around epilepsy and creates legal barriers to community activities (like field trips) and settings (like recreation programs) for children with epilepsy.

Diastat is valium suspended in a gel and administered rectally (uh, blush, blush, in the bottom). Nurses apparently do not object to Ativan delivered sublingually (given under the tongue)-- same drug, different route. Ativan given under the tongue during a seizure increases the chances of choking, aspiration and secondary pneumonia. It simply is not safe. Our doctor reacted by saying "are they trying to KILL her?" when we explained the situation to him. Diastat is the most effective, safest emergency medication. It just has to be delivered through the rectum and that is, well, embarrassing, perhaps. The nursing position statement is quite clear that student privacy is an important issue to nurses. 

Personally I don't care how many people see my kid's bottom if it means she won't choke to death. Maybe I am just insensitive. 

Parents have confided in me that they do not tell providers that their child has epilepsy until the last possible moment (walking out the door) because they would never be able to hire anyone. Parents also have chosen to use less safe emergency medication (Ativan) in place of Diastat, in order to get around the nursing requirement in the Ed Code.

This policy is also looked to by Regional Centers and daycare centers. It means that children with epilepsy are often barred from participation in community settings unless they are attended by a nurse-- an unnecessary financial burden and barrier. 

Please join us in contacting you local school boards and legislators to have this policy changed. 

school boards' face the impossible

I attended our local school board meeting last night to hear the latest in heartbreaking discussions of what to cut from the budget. This has been a resounding theme in our district, and many others for several years. Of course, we live in California, a state which, with the 7th largest economy in the world has the worst budgeting process in the world as far as I can tell. Still with our schools in 47th out of 50th in funding, we are still trying hard to reach 51 (allowing Puerto Rico to pass us). 

And our courageous Republican minority is still holding the budget hostage (we have a super majority rule here, so that two thirds of the state legislature has to pass the budget) insisting that they will not, not, not raise taxes. It might, they insist, hurt the economy. 

And it is not just the Republican minority in the state legislature. Parcel taxes in our district have failed the last three times we attempted to campaign. People were buying new SUVs and Wii's and wide screen digital TVs and voting down parcel taxes. I guess all that spending was good for the economies of the companies manufacturing these goods-- like Sony, Toyota and GMC. At least American car companies benefitted from all our spending right? And it provided good jobs, with full minimum wage jobs and no benefits or security for retail workers at good retail outlets. 

But I am confused. 

Our govenor lowered taxes, as promised in his campaign to recall the previous govenor, and the economy does not really seem to have gotten better in the last couple years...

Hmmm. So i want to try and think this through. Cut the budget further and what are the results? More people lose their jobs and can't make their mortgages. More homes go into foreclosure. More banks struggle. There are no jobs right now, so more people need general assistance, medicaid and food stamps, (which are also being cut, in order I guess to stimulate the economy) Shelters and food banks are already overwhelmed so I guess those newly homeless people will just have to live under the bridges, which actually are kind of crowded right now...

so how does all this budget cutting help,  exactly?  Any one?

We have already had, for years, kids going around the neighborhood, standing in lines at the grocery store and at the transit stations begging for donations or selling candy and gum to support music, art, sports, and yes, inconceivably even science programs for school. Every time I see them, I am ashamed. I am ashamed of my community, my state and my country. We should be taking care of this, not them. Why are our children forced to walk the streets begging for money for their schools? That seems fiscally irresponsible. Or some kind of irresponsible. 

I am proud to pay my taxes. I would pay more. The amount of money we pay in property taxes would not even cover tuition for one of my children in private school, much less three. And that tax money is supposed to cover a lot of other things, like 911 services, road building, medical and dental insurance for children...

In the Monty Python lampoon the The Life of Brian, they lampooned the anti-government stance. "What have the Romans ever done for us?" asks one of the revolutionaries of Judea. The others chime in, "Well, aqueducts." The first guy pauses, and says, "Well, besides aqueducts!?" After some arguing back and forth the list comes to include most of civilization: aqueducts, schools, sewers, health care, roads, trade... and so on. And after the long list, the first guy finally says, "Yeah, but besides all that?"

So besides dams and aqueducts, navigable harbors and water ways, vector control, health care for children, the elderly and disabled, k-12 schools community colleges and universities, roads, bridges, street lights, public utilities management, pollution regulation, public safety, fire fighters, ambulances, trauma centers, parks and recreation services, water treatment and sewage, farmers markets, street sweeping... what the heck are we getting for our tax dollars? Yeah, but besides that...

I am proud to pay my taxes and do my bit. I wish to never see another homeless family, another homeless veteran, another mentally ill person soiled and sitting in a doorway, another child with bad teeth or another student begging for money for her school. It would be worth not getting my kids an X-Box for that. Maybe they would even get some exercise and read without one. I wonder what others would give up.  And get. If we did. 

Fund the schools. Some day this generation of kids will grow up. And I don't think they will forget what we did when it was our turn to be responsible for them.