Just Say “No” to New Taxes
Uncle Sam
Re: Proposed Tech Levy
Here we go again! We are in a period of unprecedented economic malaise. Large banks are failing. People are losing their jobs. This is no time to be going after a tax increase. Raising taxes should be reserved as a measure of last resort. The founding fathers would be be rolling over in their graves if they could see the tax burden that now enslaves their grandchildren. Did someone say that there’s talk of another tea party in Boston?
The Chamber of Commerce board should be more interested in bringing business to the peninsula than in defending the bloated school tax beast that will always be rooting around for more of the taxpayer’s dollar. Like any business, the public school should operate within its budget parameters. Priorities should be made in the budget for all necessary expenditures. Don’t tell me that public education doesn’t already have its fair share of the tax dollar, or that it’s “for the children”.
Parents of public school children need to bear more of the responsibility for their own child’s education, not the taxpayer. Look at the responsible parents who are sacrificing to fund their children’s private school education or are even homeschooling their children. Because these alternatives excel on standardized tests and there is a low cost to the taxpayer, they have become an embarrassment to the teachers’ union and promoters of status quo public education. Maybe if the parents of public school children had an incentive to get involved and not have the government carry them from the cradle to the grave, there would be fewer cars at the casinos and fewer delinquents roaming the streets at midnight. Perhaps there’s a connection…dah!
Let’s go after the opportunities for business that are passing us by, and keep our noses out of the taxpayer’s pocket. Remind the politicians that raising taxes only drives businesseses away. People lose their jobs, unemployment rises and the government’s tax revenues go down. If the chamber would just see the golden opportunities to attract business and do something about it, the tax coffers would be full and overflowing.
OK, I’ll offer a comment. As I was formerly an “insider” to the P.A. School District (up until 2.5 years ago), I was intimately familiar with it’s financial make-up and the restrictions and un-funded mandates burdening it’s ability to perform what should be it’s only mandate: Teaching and Learning. The sad reality is that our society has decided through many well-meaning laws and numerous legal rulings (that don’t care if they are well-meaning or not) that public schools MUST place special needs children into the “least restrictive learning environment” (read this as “mainstreaming”), mostly without any extra financial resources to help the Teacher, who can only bring the entire class along at the speed of their slowest student. Critics who praise the virtue of the private school and the home school scores always forget (ignore?) that the private schools don’t have to teach anyone who doesn’t fit, who can’t (or won’t) keep up, whose parents won’t help with homework, or don’t volunteer in the classroom once or twice a week. They also forget (ignore?) that children being legitimately homeschooled have student/teacher ratios of 1/1 or 2/1, not 28/1. These things make an incredible difference in teaching and learning. The Port Angeles School District has more than 17% of their student population identified with some disability, physical or mental, which requires some accomodation and extra resources to help them get through. The State funding formula does not pay for anything above 12.4% (at least as of the time I quit working there), so Basic Ed money and regular levy money MUST pick up the extra cost (more than $1,000,000 a year) to accomodate these deserving children, but that means the money is NOT available to pay for maintaining computers necessary for modern education. The School Board reduced the amount of money being asked for, and specified exactly where it would be spent. During uncertain times like these, forcing our students to make due with less than adequate learning materials, will only make it much less likely that any new business will want to relocate here, no matter how beautiful the views might be.