Common Sense And Schools

Another Everyday Wonder Woman isn’t a “new” conservative blog – she’s been writing the blog for a few years now.  But Another Everyday is focusing on education these days.

And she knows a thing or two:

Most people have no idea how complicated and painful education funding is. Virtually every dollar that comes into a district has strings attached in the form of mandates, restrictions and requirements. Some administrators have estimated that the staff time needed to keep up with all the mandated reporting and submission requirements amounts to nearly half of every full time employee in a school district. If you wonder why the ratio of administrators to teachers is so high, this is one big reason.

For instance, did you know:

1. School districts are required by law to keep separate accounts for capital, food service, debt service, future retirement benefit exposure, and operating funds, and those funds may not be transferred from one fund to another, even if they are not needed in their area;

There’s a whole string of “didja knows” following – some of them I did, some I did not.  It’s a good primer on the problems in re-jiggering education funding under the current system.

Conclusion:

Simplfiying the budgeting and allocation process will allow school districts the ability to focus on their most important priorities, ease the contortions that legislators, staff members and the public have to go through to understand and administer the process, and might even save a little money to boot as districts spend less time searching for all the little scraps they can find to make up for general fund formula reductions.

There is, of course, a whole lot of material between the intro and the conclusion.  Read the whole thing.

One thought on “Common Sense And Schools

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.