Wheat And Chaff
By Mitch Berg
The Saint Paul Public Schools need to close a $20,000,000 budget shortfall.
This is on a budget in an exceptionally highly-taxed city, that is already well over half a billlion dollars.
What’s the plan (emphasis added)?
Chief Executive Officer Michelle Walker said the district looked to cut administrators and supervisors rather than those who work in the schools, but “there are going to be impacts on both sides.”
The deficit represents 3.8 percent of the school district’s $533 million general fund budget. It’s largely a product of negotiated increases in salary and benefits, as well as inflationary increases for things like utilities and equipment.
First: as we’ve seen with the recent layoffs in Minneapolis, it’s interesting that the districts are so loaded up on useless administrative mouths to feed in the first place.
Second: The “Equipment” line item is an interesting one:
Louise Seeba, who opposed the district’s 1:1 iPad initiative, which will cost roughly $8 million a year, suggested next year’s cuts are a consequence of frivolous spending.
“I guess the voters, our parents, have to say, ‘You know what, thanks for that iPad, but now I don’t have special ed services to the level that I expect.’ I think if the schools are upset, they might have a reason,” she said.
Others downplayed iPads as a factor in the present budget picture because a referendum dedicated that money to technology.
In other words, “the iPads are being paid for by a special levy extracted from taxpayers due to an obscure vote in a low-turnout election dominated by teachers union spending; nothing to see here”.
File under “life in a one party city”.
April 9th, 2015 at 1:23 pm
You’ve got to cut the IPads, because that company does business in countries that kill homosexuals for being homosexual. We simply cannot tolerate that!
But that said, it would be beyond ironic if teachers were cut because of an initiative their union passed to send taxpayer money to a company that participates in discrimination this way. And delightful. Except for the teachers, of course.
April 9th, 2015 at 1:50 pm
Figures from the 2015 property tax statement for my ramshackle cottage:
County $1,259.44
School including levy $1,243.80
City $947.98
Metropolitan taxing districts $66.66 and Other Special Taxing Districts $91.50.
Dang, I might have to quit ragging on the City for pissing away money. They’re hardly the worst offenders.
April 9th, 2015 at 4:59 pm
You wanna get those I-Pads out of there, tell the Lefty’s that Apple does business in Israel.
By the way, speaking of the SPSD – did I hear somewhere that school districts don’t include their debt service obligations in their cost per pupil or cost in general and that some school reform group got the 3rd degree from the Democrat Party Dominated Media Culture for not comparing apples-to-apples when the school reform group did?
April 9th, 2015 at 6:43 pm
Sef; that won’t work. I’ve told many of my lefty friends that Apple is one of the largest abusers of their workers in the world. In fact, I have ragged on them about it with questions such as; “I wonder how many Foxconn workers committed suicide this week after working 80 hours?” or “Do you know how much Apple paid their Chinese children this week?” Doesn’t even phase ’em.
April 10th, 2015 at 9:34 am
Moonies, JWs, Heaven’s Gate, Apple fans. :^)
April 10th, 2015 at 5:13 pm
No offense, but I could give a shit about how bad St. Paulites are getting greased. I don’t care about how illiterate their students are either. In fact, if they can’t read well enough to follow the voting sheet their lefty social worker gave them at the welfare office, all the better. After all, they are getting exactly and precisely what they voted for.
The only thing I care about is when will the housing market up there joins the rest of the country, so I can offload my property and not have to contribute another buck.