Fortunately, Craig Westover beat me to it.<\/p>\n
And it’s not pretty<\/a>:<\/p>\n As a conservative I mourn the loss of the traditional plastic lunch tray, cast on the ash heap of history with the once-indispensible slide rule and the ubiquitous pink \u201cWhile you were out \u2026\u201d phone pad. It\u2019s always sad when great traditions, like having a class valedictorian, die. Don\u2019t we all miss the songs of happy field hands harvesting crops in the dark of night before greedy farmers replaced migrant workers with mechanized equipment?<\/p>\n Indeed, that miserly attitude is precisely what is rearing its ugly head right in Waseca public schools, according to the ever-vigilant Fitzgerald.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Remember – according to John Fitzgerald, the main advantage of district schools is their “accountability”, via their elected boards.<\/p>\n So we finally get accountability – cost savings in tough times – and…what?<\/p>\n Sure, washing trays requires \u201cpersonnel, chemicals, water, heat and electricity to run 100 loads a day. At the junior high, a three-sink system has replaced the electric dishwasher to hand wash pots, pans and miscellaneous utensils with a wash, rinse, sanitize procedure.\u201dAnd OK, switching to #6 Styrofoam trays means no more paper boats or cups or wax paper sheets needed, making the total garbage output smaller. Even with throwing the trays away, there is one less sack of garbage each lunch at the junior high. But six people are going to lose their jobs.<\/p>\n Such drastic cuts \u2013 reducing expenses and cutting waste — would not be necessary, says Fitzgerald, had not state cut Waseca school funding by an inflation-adjusted 14 percent. Without those cuts, there\u2019d be money in the budget for benevolent hiring. But noooo. Fiscal accountability has, in a district like Waseca, made cutting jobs to save $30,000 in the budget \u201ca big deal.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Of course, this isn’t for yuks:<\/p>\n OK, time to get serious, because a person losing his or her job is serious. But from Fitzgerald\u2019s article it is clear that putting resources into the six specific jobs lost at Waseca was consuming more of society\u2019s wealth than was being produced. Fitzgerald wants the moral high ground because he can point to six specific (probably low-income) people who lost their jobs, but the economic reality is because the school is providing the same lunch service at less cost more resources are available for more productive uses. Somewhere, albeit unseen, someone will have a job that otherwise might not exist. (Maybe even a diversity counselor.)<\/p>\n Producing more for less is always better for the overall economy. What Fitzgerald seems to be saying is it is too bad the Waseca schools weren\u2019t flusher so they could continue to operate without having to worry about doing things more efficiently and effectively. It\u2019s too bad the school district can\u2019t do a little benevolent job creation<\/a> at public expense. It\u2019s too damn bad that wishes aren\u2019t horses.<\/p>\n And we wonder why the government-run public education system has become a money pit?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n More on this later this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Taking down MN2020 has become a higher-concept version of what fact-checking Nick Coleman used to be; a rhetorical gravy train for regional bloggers. I was going to go after our old friend John Fitzgerald’s piece on the effect of state aid cuts on the Waseca school district; they switched from permanent plastic lunch trays to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8706"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8708,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8706\/revisions\/8708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.looktruenorth.com\/images\/FreedomDogs\/looktruenorthsmall140.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n