Grade: C
It was a sad day, Monday, June 9, when 220 teachers in Volusia County were let go -- many referred to as "Black Monday."
This act represents a series of foul ups that are well worth examining.
To get the readers juices flowing, note that in a recent school year the Volusia County Schools budget was about $1.3 billion, which is close to $20,000for each of the 65,000 students in the K-12 system.
This is not a number that is easy to find but it can be found in the school budget proceedings if you look hard enough. The Volusia taxpayers are not being stingy with their tax dollars. Twenty thousand per student is a “humongous” figure.
These huge budget numbers have been spurred by the huge amounts of money that are being spent to build huge new schools. This school building boom was spurred by the very ill-conceived mandate for smaller class size. Therefore, the public along with the people who prodded them into voting for the class size amendment can shoulder a fair amount of blame for the huge feckless spending boom in the school system.
The huge expenditures have led to a shortfall in revenues and the need to let go of personnel since they can’t sell the school buildings.
The fact that so many of the people being let go are full time classroom teachers shows that the people running the system are missing a golden opportunity to get rid of some of the huge surplus of non-teachers. The public school system has proportionately about three times as many non-teachers as the private school system.
It seems like just yesterday that the media was full of stories about a teacher shortage. This story about a teacher shortage surfaces several times each decade. As far as some of us can remember, it has always turned out to be false.
One such time when the cry went out that there was a shortage of teachers in the sciences we went out and found a few qualified candidates. The school system showed so very little interest in them we quit finding candidates.
To review the chain of blame start with the people who hoodwinked the public into voting for the class size amendment. Then, blame the public for being uninformed enough to think that smaller class seizes would help the public schools system.
Next, blame the school administration for stockpiling so many non-teachers.
At the bottom of this mess are the teachers who moved to Florida to get a job and have been laid off. They are being punished for believing what they heard from the government school system.
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