Column for April 29, 2010

Since there is an upcoming election in just over a week, I am sure you have seen the campaign signs all around Johnston County. One of the races is for school board. I already have my two candidates picked out and those are the only two for which I shall cast a ballot. I know I can vote for 3, but there are two people I know and trust to be worthy of my vote. One of which is my best friend.

There is one campaign sign that totally irks me when I see it. The slogan for the candidate reads, "It's ALL about the kids!" No, in fact it is not about the kids at all. It is about the education of children. There is a huge difference betwixt the two. It is not just a matter of semantics. It is a matter of world view. My world view is that it is the parents' responsibility to be about the business of children. It is the school system's responsibility to perform scholastic education as directed by the school board. When we confuse the two concepts, schools become an expensive, overstaffed babysitting service with little discipline. When the focus is upon imparting education, then it is realized that discipline and fiscal responsibility actually matter and taxpayers are the ones footing the bills.

North Carolina is facing a $1.2 billion budget gap this year. Some years we have had that much of a surplus and the state legislature went on a spending spree instead of paying down debt with the surplus. Now we are paying for that sort of irresponsibility yet again. With that much of a budget gap, we have to make large cuts in our state spending, just as we would do in our home budget. I have an email on my computer from the governor's office about proposed cuts in spending. Unfortunately, it also has a lot of spending increases outlined for the state.

In a time when the state is in a financial bind, you would think that government workers would be happy to even have a job. That does not seem to be the case with The North Carolina Association of Educators, though. That labor union has published a propaganda flyer (also on my computer for my viewing pleasure) that is pushing for restoration of funding from cuts made last year. In a year when the state is $1.2 billion dollars short in proposed spending, I have a hard time with agreeing to increase school spending by $225 million. Obviously schools have gotten along just fine without that $225 million.

The flyer goes on to opine the .5% pay cuts that teachers and government employees took last year. A half of a percent! That is nothing compared to the possibility of having no job at all. Show some gratitude, NCAE. Then the special interest group went on to rail about getting teacher pay up to the national average. Something to remember about the national average is that it takes into account very expensive regions and accordingly higher salaries. This is North Carolina, not New York City.

Governor Beverly Perdue is already promising to pay back that salary reduction. Sorry, but I do not agree with that concept at all. Where I work, if times get hard and we lay off employees, we suck it up and keep moving onward, doing our jobs. If we have to take a pay cut or reduction in an increase, then we deal with it and don't expect to get paid back for that. Instead, we realize that times are hard financially and are grateful to even have a job.

My wife lost her job a year ago January. We dealt with the loss of income. She would gladly have taken a .5% decrease in pay to keep her job at the time. Now that we have a seven-year-old, a nine-month-old, and one more on the way, we are actually glad that she gets to stay at home.

Private and parochial schools learned a long time ago that they could not operate on bloated staff count and had to run lean on budgets. Still, they tend to turn out a decent quality education. The schools I attended were public schools, controlled by the town. Local taxpayers and school board officials made sure that the schools ran on a tight budget but still cranked out a quality education for the area children.

Money is not always the answer to giving a quality education. School systems need to run lean, spending wisely the money that is forcibly taken from taxpayers whether they have children in school or not. Government in general has to start doing the same.