Education Budget Cuts

Well, the budget cuts are starting to take their toll in very interesting ways. Here are just a few.

The teachers received just $100 per classroom to buy supplies for 30 students. That's a minuscule amount of money for that many kids. We have already run out of writing paper and erasers, so we recently had to send home letters to parents asking for "donations" of supplies.

Our in-house copies have been limited to just a few hundred per month. This makes reteaching lessons almost impossible, because they need to be copied and completed immediately. We can't wait for a copy order to return from the print shop a week later.

Field trips have been limited to just one per class per year, unless the teachers figure out a way to raise more money through fundraising. The problem with fundraising is that we are constantly asking the same group of people for funds - the parents, who probably thought paying taxes was the biggest fundraiser of all.

Since buses cost upwards of $500 for a field trip, we are trying to invite guest speakers and hold assemblies instead. However, our district is so desperate for money and worried about liability that they now have a laundry list of legal requirements for vendors before they can set foot on our campuses. The red tape is so long that neither the parent-teacher organizations nor the teachers want to deal with it. Without support from these two groups, the school will come to a screeching halt, and the students won't participate in any enrichment activities.

The campus isn't as clean as it used to be either. Our classrooms are serviced only two days per week now. We try to make the students pick up as much as possible, but there are some things that require a vacuum cleaner. The windows are unwashed, there's trash in the flowerbeds, and the classified union doesn't want anyone to step on the custodians' toes and pick it up. So, the garbage lays there until the two custodians we still have have time to pick it up.

We have six computers in our computer lab that haven't worked for more than a month. We no longer have enough IT people to make it to all of the campuses to fix things. The students are having to double up, which is okay except when they're working on an individual project. Then, computer time becomes a scheduling nightmare.

Our School Librarian has been out repeatedly from illness, but there's no money in the budget for a substitute for him, so the students just don't go to the library when he's out. Some classes have been to the library only a few of times this year, and it's already the end of the first trimester.

I could go on, but it gets pretty depressing to think that things are only going to get worse, while through it all, we're expected to keep raising test scores. What a mess...