We should just send all our students to private schools for this price!

‘CADILLAC PRICES FOR YUGO RESULTS’

The more things don’t change…I said similar things during my time on my hamlet’s Budget Committee while evaluating our School District’s budget – it was always a case of that old joke “Go ahead, find the boots”*.  I’ve been off the BudComm for a few years now but nothing has changed – lower enrollements and higher costs.  As I said during a BudComm meeting last week, it seems that the School Board is not working for the taxpayers and protecting their tax monies but an active agent for the teachers union.

Anyways, that above quote is from the current BudComm Chair Norm Silber – and I agree with it totally (and glad he’s one of our NH House Reps):

Gilford Budget Committee chairman criticizes amount spent on schools
By GAIL OBER, LACONIA DAILY SUN

GILFORD — Gilford spends $22,000 a year on each of its students, but ranks in the middle of the state on standardized tests, and that’s made Budget Committee Chairman Norman Silber unhappy.

It SHOULD make every taxpayer unhappy – including slobberin School Board sycophants (and educators) Joe Wernig and Debra LaLiberte (who revisted her political sashaying and posturing (I gotta resurrect that video of her literally impolitely sashaying and berating the BudComm) – I guess NO BudComm Chair or member is every good enough for her.  It is either “give the School Board all that they want” or the highway. That haughty arrogance both abounds and suffuses through the whole Edu-Industrial Complex.  And then you wonder how they have public school costs the same or much higher than private schools?

And here’s the Yugo part:

Silber took the opportunity at the end of the Budget Committee’s public hearing Thursday on the proposed 2017-18 budget to tell the sparse audience that research from the state Department of Education indicates that tests taken last last school year show that of the 58 school districts in the state, Gilford ranked 25th.

He estimated the district spends $22,000 per student, has a 10 to 1 average student-teacher ratio, has a 24 percent free-and-reduced lunch population and an average SAT score of 1160. The numbers show that 64 percent of the students were proficient in English and 49 percent were proficient in mathematics.

“I am not impressed,” he said, adding the school district is paying “Cadillac prices for Yugo results.”

I used to point this stuff out all the time.  The School Board / SAU’s own materials used to pat themselves on the back with 95+% of “Highly Qualified Teachers”.  Well, when you have such, and paying for such, we SHOULD expect much, much better results.  Year after year, excuse after excuse for not attaining the results we pay our employees to deliver.  In the private sector, they’d be paid.

Here, they get a raise outstripping the average and median income levels of the town’s residents.  Yet again, I had to ask “Who is now the Public Master and who is the public servants?  Who is working for whom?”.  And we see this over and over again all over NH – again, the arrogance of School Boards rivals the most hard-core Progressive in their “We know what is best for you – don’t get in our way!”

…He said the function of the Budget Committee is to be “the watchdog for the public taxes.”  I used to say that the BudComm was the last bastion of defense for taxpayers – it was clear from the meeting I went to that the School Board (and the SAU staff that showed up) still believe that the BudComm ought to lay down for them the way they do for the union:

In a previous meeting, the Budget Committee had earlier voted 6 to 3 to reduce the proposed 2017-18 budget to this year’s default budget plus the bond payment for the elementary school or $25,903,694. Superintendent Kirk Beitler said the School Board met briefly after Thursday’s public hearing and voted not to recommend the Budget Committee’s adjusted budget.

Of COURSE they did.  Waaaaaaaaa.  Crybullies.

Voters will get once chance to change the bottom line of the budget at the deliberative session of School District Meeting on Feb. 9 at 7 p.m. in the Gilford High School auditorium.

You betcha – and I hope for lesser.  They’re already working off a lessened budget this year as the Town folks rejected their budget as well.

Gosh, it’s almost like they’re all Democrats for the way they want more money for the lack of results these employees are giving  us.

Oh wait…..