Posted on 01/01/2010 3:42:33 PM PST by Halfmanhalfamazing
After a stormy summer in which the Kansas City School District shed more than 500 employees, its remade human resources department faces another huge task.
With about 3,300 employees, the district still has about 1,000 more people than most districts with enrollments of about 17,000 students, said Steve Harris, the new assistant superintendent for human resources.
“We’re way out of sync,” Harris said. “We want to try to get as close as we can for the next school year.”
(Excerpt) Read more at kansascity.com ...
3,300 for a total student population of 17K?
Colleges do more with less, much less grade schools...
Unions baby!!! The suckage of the KCMO School District is epic.
We have a society in which large numbers of adults live off children. That is something new.
that’s nothing. they have about 30,000 too many voters.
The Government Schools show the ineffiency of beauracratic government, which should give the Libertarian ping list reason to post, “We told them so!”
In Missouri, after 5 years, public school teachers receive what's commonly called "tenure," a special employment protection that teachers unions defend. As the below federal statistics indicate, teachers with just a couple years of experience are practically impossible to fire.
Kansas City, MO School District, Teachers resume salary talks
Sep. 25 -- The Kansas City School District and its teachers union resume salary negotiations Monday, amid signs that the two are headed for rockier relations.
In recent years the district and the union have had relatively smooth dealings. That changed Tuesday when more than 150 members of the Kansas City Federation of Teachers marched outside district offices complaining of low pay, lost paychecks, students without schedules and other opening-of-school glitches.
Expensive, bloated bureaucracies. This is yet another reason to homeschool, don't you agree?
“...but 120 teachers and 98 support staff were involuntarily let go.”
If the job of schools is to teach why is that the first to get canned are the teachers. They always keep the clerks, and counselors and admin assistants and can the teachers.
Oh, I get it. They are putting the screws to the taxpayers. Just like the first govt employees to get the axe are firemen and cops or they make cuts in the defense dept.
There you go! They are non productive feather merchants. They could fire 1000 tenured teachers at random and not make that school system a lot worse.
Good way to put it.
In my county the government schools are the biggest single employer in the county. No other business comes close in budgets, expenditures, or number of employees. Now...Add to that the vendors to the government schools and their employees. Even my dentist with his 5 employees depends upon government school dental insurance to keep his office running.
So?....With all these people sitting in the pews of our “Christian” churches how many of these churches are going to do what is right and open private schools ( tuition charging or tuition-free)? In reality, few ministers will bite the hand putting money in the collection plate. These weenies would rather have kids sent off to the atheistic Marxist indoctrination camps every day and soothe their consciences by sprinkling the kids with a little religion once or twice a week.
Marxism is our nation's **most** urgent and serious threat. Government schools are the Marxists’ **most** powerful weapon. And...NO! Our churches will NOT do much about it. We as conservatives must first recognize the threat to our nation, and open tuition-free conservative schools without expecting much help from the churches.
Wasn’t KC the school district where a (Federal?) judge order them to spend like $200M upgrading their schools. Think that was back in the 80s. Anyway, they built these brand new facilities and modernized their curriculum and guess what?? It made absolutely no difference in test scores or acheivement. Taxes sure went up though.
Good grief, the district I work for has twice as many students and 3,500 employees..and I think my district is inefficient.
“Wasn’t KC the school district where a (Federal?) judge order them to spend like $200M upgrading their schools. Think that was back in the 80s. Anyway, they built these brand new facilities and modernized their curriculum and guess what?? It made absolutely no difference in test scores or acheivement. Taxes sure went up though.”
That was because they were given tons of money to “desegregate” the schools, thanks to an idiot judge. Smaller districts have continued to suffer because KC got the money.
Some where in my files I have a print out of the waste that “desegregation” brought about. I’ll refrain from stating my opinion about that, it would be “racist”.
I think $200 MM is a gross underestimate. I believe it was over a billion the judge ordered for the KC schools.
It WAS a Billion....I remmeber it distinctly!!
“Wasn’t KC the school district where a (Federal?) judge order them to spend like $200M upgrading their schools. Think that was back in the 80s. Anyway, they built these brand new facilities and modernized their curriculum and guess what?? It made absolutely no difference in test scores or acheivement. Taxes sure went up though.”
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Yep, the Superintendent was Dr. Ronald Epps (sp?). He was hired by Rockford Dist 205 in Illinois after their desegregation lawsuit. I graduated from East High RPS 205 in 1990 right at the start of the suit. Didn’t think the schools could get worse, but he proved me wrong. We spent over $350 million and it did nothing. We got our schools back under board control about 10 years ago.
I’m a teacher now in the district and can tell you he divided our town like it was a civil war. At the end almost everyone hated the man; his name is still synonymous with division and incompetence.
By the way folks, you can’t fire councilors, homeless outreach advocates, special education administrators, diversity administrators, and the like. Many states have laws preventing them from being canned. That leaves the teachers. One bad teacher can cause problems in a building. However, it takes just one idiot administrator to screw-up a building or school district.
I spent a summer in KC when this whole debacle was at its peak. They built these spanking new schools with expensive amenities from Olympic size swimming pools, offering exotic cirriculum from Latin, to sports, etc. They had this huge advertising campaign to convince whitie to send their kids to these schools. It was big failure.
The extra employees are the hoards of nigh-useless Affirmative Action layabouts that infest every big city Dept. of Ed. Check your school board's Maintenance, Transportation, and food service personnel. Then check the office staff. In fact, check EVERY PAID, non-classroom position. If more than a third of those people are mission-critical, I'll buy each of them a malt liquor.
You want to see how to run an administration of a school district, check your local parochial school network. 5 times the result on a tenth the budget per student.
First, get rid of all the PC positions, the equal opportunity specialists, the ones who teach “tolerance” (a.k.a., intolerance towards those who have principles), etc.
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