Any county whose citizens want to keep funding the programs McDonnell has cut can do so, simply by raising their property tax rates.
Any citizens who want more money for education can make it happen, by playing the lottery (all lottery money goes to education).
And any group who is upset about kids starving for lack of breakfast can set up a charity program to provide breakfasts for children.
McDonnell cut parts of the state budget that were least associated with the legitimate state functions. It does seem harsh, but this just puts our spending back to where it was a few of years ago, when Warner/Kaine were taking all the surplus taxes and pouring it into jobs for public service workers who are majority democrats.
Maybe now counties won’t spend 37 million dollars on a school administration building, or pay school administrators hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe we won’t have so many school counselors.
In my county, we are likely to lose specialty school buses, we’ll be paying for college-level tests, and parking fees will increase. Kids will have to pay to participate in after-school sports.
Unfortunately, we will probably lose some language classes, even though they could offer the same classes by using the expensive computer network they have put in all the schools to offer multi-school language courses taught by a single teacher.
We already lost some special classes last year in some schools because there weren’t enough teachers to offer the class multiple times — I don’t know why they don’t offer the remote classroom option, and have the teacher go from school to school so every class gets a real teacher once a week. They could hire teacher’s assistants for the other classes, or maybe save a few administrator jobs by having them do their paperwork in these classrooms to monitor the students.
This will be hardship for my family, driving two kids to school because of the bus situation. And frankly, if they offered us the choice of paying a fee for a bus, I’d pay it, but it would be my choice, and I don’t see why other virginians should have to pay higher taxes to send my kids to alternate schools.
In the olden days, my kiddo’s classrooms always had at least one parent volunteer serving as the teacher’s assistant, particularly in the lower grades. I understand that some states no longer allow this unless the “volunteer” meets some ridiculous educational criteria. Ridiculous. There are many ways they can cut costs but it would destroy their fiefdom.