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Posted on 07/13/2011 2:21:59 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
The Texas Education Agency said Tuesday that it is laying off 178 employees this week. Those are among the first of thousands of state government layoffs expected in the coming weeks.
The TEA decision has been months in the making, as the agency seeks to reduce its staff by 32 percent to cope with budget cuts ordered by the Texas Legislature..
This week's layoffs come on the heels of 91 layoffs by the agency in February, with another 74 people retiring, quitting or transferring this year.
At the start of the legislative session in January, lawmakers proposed a 2012-13 budget that a Legislative Budget Board analysis said would cut 9,600 positions statewide in an attempt to balance a budget that spends 8 percent less than the current one. By the time the Legislature passed a budget in late May, the board estimated that 5,700 state government jobs would be lost, a 2.4 percent reduction from 2011 to 2013.
[snip]
[TEA] Staffers being laid off, all of whom are in Austin..
........"there are hardly any departments that are not impacted."
..."When (senior managers) tried to determine which positions to keep, they looked at which employees were performing critical duties for the agency, and they also looked at flexibility," Ratcliffe said. "We need employees who can adapt to change."
Two weeks ago, the Texas Water Development Board, a state agency that does long-term water planning,.... Almost all of the cuts are being made to the staff in Austin........
In late June, the 3,000-employee Texas Parks and Wildlife Department announced more than 100 layoffs ...About half of the layoffs are being done in Austin.....
(Excerpt) Read more at statesman.com ...
As reported in the Austin American-Statesman and other Texas news outlets, "The cuts were made to deal with reduced state tax revenue caused by the national economic downturn. The Legislature decided to cut spending by $15.2 billion rather than increase taxes or spend all of the $9.7 billion rainy day fund."
“We need employees who can adapt to change.”
You’re fired! Now adapt to that change!
It the dept. could function without these people why were they there in the first place?
Because government always grows -- but when you won't raise taxes and don't spend all the money [thank you Rick Perry and the GOP held TX legislature] government shrinks!!!!
Hmmmmm.....sounds subversive and un-American somehow.
99% of the people necessary for the education of the young ‘uns work in the elementary, junior and senior high school buildings America’s youths attend. You could lay off almost every one of the parasites who populate state departments of education and the federal education department and the effect on education would be overwhelmingly positive.
The sanctuary City of Fort Worth needs to trim the fat, too. We’ve got garbage police and an international advocate for homosexuality, funded by the taxpayer to harrass the taxpayer.
You are right in the “ballpark.”
When I was in school back in the 50’s our elementary school had:
25+ students per classroom
1 teacher and no helpers or assistants
1 Principal
1 Vice Principal
1 School nurse
2 Office employees
1 Janitor
The school served 1/2 of a town of 17,000 people plus those in the county nearby.
That’s it! No other employees were needed and the teachers had no problem with a 25+ classroom or discipline of the students. That was taken care by the “board of education” (paddle) if you know what I mean.
Now look at the educational empires today.
That'll cause Lefty heads all over America to ...
When Memorial Parkway Elementary School in Katy, TX has all their announcements on parent/teacher days in SPANISH, someone is spending money on the wrong things.
My kid missed one day . . . for Eastern Orthodox Christmas . . . and they said he didn’t have “perfect attendance.” I didn’t care, but he was excited about getting the award and was in the 2nd Grade. The Muslim kids left every Friday, and that wasn’t counted against their attendance.
My son was asked to draw a picture of a cowboy for rodeo. He was the only one who drew one with a revolver. We were called into the school to talk about how inappropriate it was for school. I didn’t realize they were only allowed to draw pictures of Brokeback Mountain Cowboys.
They steal our money and we homeschool.
Fire them all. The government has NO business in education. When you let them have your children, they are no longer *your* children. They use your children to try to build their utopia. We need to wake up and put an end to government-run education.
Anyone who calls them self an “educator” needs fired immediately.
Well worth repeating !
In Houston's HISD, there are at least 2.3 OTHER employees for every classroom teacher.
We also had a load of things we “can’t afford” any longer like; music ever year, art, social studies, geography, science class, physical education, nice playgrounds with enough but not too much. I guess some schools still have some of this but most don’t have all of it. I am thrilled our kids are no longer in the public scrool system.
We didn’t have a school nurse and we had one office employee and no Vice Principal. The administration for the entire grade school was two small rooms. No empire. My family lived next door to the principal who did well but not elaborately well. He came out most mornings for the flag ceremony when one of the cub scout dens would do the flag raising and lowering at the close of the day.
We arrived in the morning and started by 0730 and got out in time to hurry home for afternoon cartoons at 1630. It was a full day but we did have recess in the morning and afternoon for about 20 minutes and then at lunch for about 30 minutes if you could eat fast enough. We all walked to school, there was no line of cars morning and evening. A few buses transported the country kids and sometimes we rode with them when we overnighted on a visit.
I think I had a better education than the kids do today.
I think I had a better education than the kids do today.
And that is just at the ISD! Whole battalions of civil serpents in Austin at the Texas department of education labor away (I use the term loosely) doing not much of anything worth doing, and further divisions of federal civil serpents issue dictats, revise forms, prepare reports nobody reads about things nobody cares about. Seriously, educational productivity would soar if every one of these useless barnacles were laid off and required to get jobs as WalMart greeters. Teachers in the schools could teach, principals could administer, and 3/4 of the schools assistant superintendents, deputy under assistant superintendents, etc. etc. etc. could be eliminated - most of their jobs involves feeding useless data to the state and federal parasites; eliminate those at higher levels, and the schools would need teachers, building principals, a superintendent, and a business manager, plus a few custodians, cafeteria workers, and bus drivers.
As it is now, probably 2/3 or the money we expend on educational personnel salaries and benefits is completely wasted.
Hate to be picky or pointing fingers but something seemed to happen from about 1965 forward. Younger siblings from that time compared to pre-1960 offspring raised by the same parents have a much different outlook on the world. Different value system, less appreciation of history, sacrifice of those before, relevance of tradition or just plain acceptance of same as a good thing, more self absorbed, more about MY pleasure, less reasoning and less skeptical of information, critical thinking powers less, more herd mentality oriented, less of what my son calls native knowledge about how things work. Just seems that way to me.
The entire TSA should be eliminated. Texas would have an income surplus if we did away with socialized schools and had a capitalist school industry. Socialized schooling is no more justified than socialized medicine. The arguments for both are the same.
Eliminate socialized schooling.
Higher Education Coalition attack on [Texas Gov. Rick] Perry raises eyebrows
I agree that Perry is better than Bush on the subject. But that isn’t saying much.
But the problem remains that we have socialized schooling.
We need to totally do away with socialized schooling and replace it with a capitalist system. If Texas just replaced the socialized schooling system with a capitalist schooling system the state would have an income surplus.
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