Thank goodness for The Rubber Stampers!
The Courant's Don Stacom is reporting:
The state budget crisis edged closer to Connecticut's classrooms Wednesday, when the state school board reluctantly endorsed more than $280 million in potential spending cuts next year. Leaders of local school systems reacted grimly and warned that reductions of that magnitude would seriously bruise public education...
Cutting ECS grants by 12 percent across the board would inflict the heaviest damage on the cities. Instead, the state board suggested various formulas that would reduce aid by $413 to $428 per student. That could wipe out most grants to affluent suburbs, while doing relatively less harm to cities.
And the NHRs Luther Turmelle is reporting:
Faced with the likelihood of a more than $1 million shortfall in state aid, the Board of Education is facing some hard choices when Superintendent of Schools Greg Florio unveils his fiscal 2009-10 budget Jan. 8. But despite that grim prospect, Florio and the board Thursday night were careful about using the word “layoff” of some of the district’s roughly 400 teachers.
Boy-oh-boy... in difficult times like these, I feel so fortunate to have Rubber Stamp majorities on both the Council and BOE!* I don't even want to imagine how terrible times would be if we didn't have our Rubber Stampers to defend mismanagement* and wasteful spending* in government.
And perhaps the biggest benefit of having Rubber Stamp majorities - we get to see those mean, nasty, bitterly partisan Republicans for what they are! After all, we saw a perfect demonstration of their ways when they voted against the teachers a couple weeks ago! I mean, why else would they have voted to further discuss a union contract that included a 4.4% wage increase for each of the next three years? The economy is great and it's such a paltry sum... people in private industry (and in the town side unions) must all be getting much more handsome wage increases, right?
But on a serious note... I don't quite agree that "the responsible thing to do" was waste $20,000 on a pool consultant, while suggesting that spending $20k to further discuss the teachers' union contract would have been effectively "anti-teacher."
Tim White
* see the spot on comment from Alan Sobol
* hotWatergate
* such as with the town's two dozen take home vehicles
4 comments:
"Parking fees" and "activity fees" will not work this time. Try something more creative. Oh, about "contractual obligations" you had the chance to do something about that but you flunked the test. Go back and study more. Next test will be in '09.
We are going to "support our teacehrs' by passing a teacher's contract that will cause many to be laid off.
Tim, since you spent some time in 'Nam, isn;t this sorta like "we had to destroy the village in order to save it"?
What dumbfounds me is when the majority effectively voted in favor of the new contract.
Unless you're sticking your head in the sand... how could one have missed the mess we've got on our hands? 533,000 lost jobs in November... and another two or three hundred thousand who gave up jobhunting.
Even the Council's history teacher was surprised by the size of the contract. Yet they insisted on moving forward.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats are perfect. But this current Council majority seems to be living in a dream world.
Don't worry though... pretty soon we'll have $50,000 worth of pretty pictures of all of our streets! Then everything will be fine.
No, no, no. Matt Altieri assured us all that Cheshire was well-positioned to handle any financial crisis that might come our way.
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