My wife and I are opposed to House Bill 129, which takes away local control and referendums for school budget funding. We hope our legislators will vote against it.
We have voted locally for some of the funding and against some over the years. We don’t want the state telling us what we have to do - automatic tax increases based on cost of living increases, for our local schools. Bureaucrats and legislators avoiding the need to explain the need and justify the tax increase requests by making them automatic.
Those school taxes have been steadily increasing, particularly hard on low income, fixed income and seniors. Not everyone can manage it. Tax increases should be local decision by vote, by consent. We like the need to get referendum approval or disapproval. We vote for school board members and in all tax referendums. We vote against some increases.
What we have seen over years is rather bad planning and management of these expensive projects by school boards that show little talent for it.
We also see lots of grandiose, costly ideas of education efforts. Easy to do when dreaming big with other people’s tax dollars. Before unions came, we had an excellent public education because of excellent teachers in a plain high school with no costly swimming pool, sports facilities, nor any of the extravagances, exotic programs and courses, and very expensive digital-age hardware which one now sees in our local schools.
Do we see graduates better equipped to face the world than we were? Are they smarter or better people? Better thinkers? Sadly and expensively, afraid not. Statistical Sussex median family income is $31,000, which is slightly below the poverty line of $32,000. Are these good results for our education tax dollars?
The school system is broken. Waste is common in the school bureaucracies. No one is responsible or accountable for waste or losses. A Kent County middle school cafeteria supervisor reported to us that 60 percent or more of the socially beneficially correct foods served were thrown out because the students would not eat them. But they keep doing it. Bureaucrats doing social engineering with our money, all theory and no reality checks.
School staffs are commonly disgruntled and simply enduring, not the dedicated teachers we had and remember with great respect. Thanks to unions, deadwood, incompetent staff cannot be fired because of the difficulties and cost of trying to do so.
And our ever-increasing tax bill for this mucky educational system gets no checks to its spiraling, expensive course. And discipline of disrespectful students? Forget it; doesn’t happen. Rather, always, “give us more money.”
The previous Cape Henlopen High School was only 30 years old when torn down - a colossal waste of our tax money, with lousy construction, mold, bad planning. And the new high school is already being expanded when the cement is barely dry from the first round.
School boards are not so good at managing money or projects, nor even at figuring out best to do for long run. They have little expertise in planning, construction, cost containment, and no real personal responsibility. But at least, under present law, we can kick them out and confront their errors in the local newspapers. And we can vote against their oversized budgeting, if necessary, in referendum.
Yes, we are for giving all our community’s children an excellent education. We just don’t think it is happening, and we don’t think more money has shown it will fix it. We think the system is fundamentally broken.
This Delaware House Bill 129 is like leaving a faucet open. Taxpayers would no longer be able to turn it off. Watch those taxers. As Daniel Webster first said, “The power to tax is the power to destroy.”
Mike and Elisabeth Zajic
Lewes
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