It is a classic tale of progressive woe; years of lousy policy create a problem that those responsible insist needs more funding … for them to fix it. The correct course of action is to fire all of them, take back your money and power, and do something different, but it is a hill they are prepared to die on.
Bad pandemic policy did a world of damage, but nothing is as insidious as telling a child with no concept of sex and gender that they might be in the wrong body. These narratives are ubiquitous in public education, which is using the damage they’ve done to permit schools to operate like mental health clinics. As if you would give an institution that can’t teach kids to read and write carte blanch to treat the mental illness they created.
Public Schools, with few exceptions, exist to break things, your children, then put them back together in the progressive image. It kills some of them, ruins many, and sterilizes some while forever claiming they need more resources. More money, more personnel, more of everything but parental rights or involvement.
It’s a nationwide act of kidnapping where the ransom money is your tax bill, and everyone pays it forever. Here in New Hampshire, they get unelected judges to create rights for which other people must pay. Pro Tip: if it’s a right, it’s free.
Over in Vermont, they’ve got problems, too, not the least of which is deciding the next phase in their multi-generational mission to f*** with the children. It’s expensive and has a lot of moving pieces, and to keep the wheels coming off the bus, the legislature is going to have to piss some people off.
Lucky for Vermonters, those are the lawmakers they’ve been electing.
“Vermont is challenged by the fact that we have a foot in the past and a foot in the future,” said Jeff Francis, executive director of the superintendents’ association. “We’ve really wanted to hang on to small schools as the center of every community and, at the same time, make sure that we have robust opportunity for every child in the state.
Francis said Vermont’s values of “rural, bucolic and local” are at odds with running an efficient, modern educational system.
Montpelier Roxbury Public School District superintendent Libby Bonesteel provided one example. In her district, Roxbury Village School has 13 full-time staff for just 42 students. From an operational standpoint, it would be easy to close the school and bring those students to Montpelier’s Union Elementary without any additional costs, Bonesteel said. But it’s not a decision school board members can make quickly or unilaterally because of how important the school is to members of the Roxbury community.
School boards “need legislators’ help and support and backing when they come to a community with a decision that might be hard,” Bonesteel said.
Roxbury Villiage can probably solve this themselves, beginning with asking why they need a full-time staffer for every three students. It seems like they could do this with less and a little ingenuity because sending them to Montpelier Union Elementary sounds like an intellectual death sentence—one that follows the mental health vein, according to the same experts.
[Superintendent Libby] Bonesteel said most districts in the state, including hers, are now offering alternative programs for students whose behavioral and mental health challenges make it impossible for them to be in a traditional classroom. She said her district doubled its spending on social-emotional and mental health services in the past three years, from $1.5 million to $3 million. It’s yielded positive results, including a reduction in hazing, harassment and bullying investigations, and suspensions. But those results come with a price.
“We need high-quality staff to help these kids with what their needs are,” Bonesteel said.
A more accurate assessment would be, we’ve screwed up your kids, and we’d like to expand our funding, power, and influence, but we need you to pay for it. It’s like a mugging that never ends. A Mafia extortion racket. Protection money. You pay us, and we won’t hurt you. Your kids, on the other hand, are doomed, but if you try to take them back, that might not end well for you either.
But it will. Vermont needs Education Freedom Accounts. It needs to link the money to the student, and the success will likely follow for a fraction of the cost. That’s what Roxbury Villiage likely needs. Find a few parents willing to homeschool, create your own cooperative, schedule learning based on ability, and get other parents involved to help kids get caught up.
They could probably hire tutors or a private operation for a thimble full of what Vermont is currently milking them to screw with their kid’s heads while failing to teach them anything approaching academics.
The Public school model is broken. It has lost its way and fails to provide value. In America, that is an invitation to innovators, and they are out there. So, the problem for voters is not how to fix public schools but how to force them to fix themselves.
Just say no. No more money. No new duties or responsibilities. We’re stripping some from you until you show competency at the core purpose of teaching children to read, write, and do math, and not what to learn but how to learn.
You’ve failed your assessment again. We should no longer reward you for failure.
