Posted on 07/02/2017 3:45:20 PM PDT by artichokegrower
Faced with significant salary hikes and ballooning health benefit and pensions, school districts across the state scrambled to balance their budgets at the end of the fiscal year.
And the outlook for the coming years is even worse.
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
The Chief Administrative Officer for Santa Cruz County, where I live, one of California's smaller counties just retired at 62 after 27 years of public employment. Her final salary with benefits was $380,000 per year. Her retirement will be $200,000 per year. To purchase an annuity that would pay that amount you would have to contribute $4,000,000. Work for the government and become a millionaire. It's all coming to a big bust.
It really gets me, to hear talk of how the state of Calif. is broke, the federal government is broke, Illinois is broke, etc.
The laws of math and economics simply cannot be ignored. Yet over the decades, politicians, both Republican and Democrat, have chosen to ignore these laws.
But the laws of math and economics are as immutable as the laws of physics. As surely as night follows day, there will be consequences for ignoring these laws.
It’s going to get ugly when the moment of truth arrives.
Does anyone think we’re immune to events such as happened in Greece and Venezuela and Puerto Rico????
Not a dime from the Feds. I refuse to help fund California’s perversions. Bad enough my state taxes have to fund NYs pervsions.
So when this thing finally goes south who’s gonna get screwed?
Will it be the employee who has worked all these years and is counting on the pension or will the taxpayers again be expected to bail these people out? If we let it crash and burn there is gonna be some really ticked off, and destitute people, and will be on the public dole anyway.
I say let it burn down and they can go on SSI and Medicare like the rest of us
>Does anyone think we’re immune to events such as happened in Greece and Venezuela and Puerto Rico????
The left does. I once spent 3 hours arguing with leftists about the health of CA’s budget on reddit. I presented graphs, articles from left wing sites, ect. Ultimately I just concluded they where in front their computers with their fingers in their ears chanting nah-nah-nah-nah. Their outlooks are very short term.
When I read these articles about education budgets, I want to know one thing that is never easy to discover. I want to take the total budget for a school district and divide it by the number of students in the district so I can see the total monies spent per student.
In some cases the per student budget is tremendous. At $10,000 per capita per year, a class room of 20 kindergarteners would have $200,000.00 to work with. I think I could teach them to scribble and stay in their seats for that amount of money, and have some left over.
A modest proposal from Tom McClintock... 11 years ago:
To understand education budget, start with math
By Tom McClintock
The multimillion-dollar campaign paid by starving teachers unions has finally placed our sadly neglected schools at the center of the budget debate.
Across California, children are bringing home notes warning of dire consequences if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s scorched-earth budget is approved — a budget that slashes Proposition 98 public-school spending from $42.2 billion this year all the way down to $44.7 billion next year.
That should be proof enough that our math programs are suffering.
As a public-school parent, I have given this crisis a great deal of thought and have a modest suggestion to help weather these dark days.
Maybe — as a temporary measure only — we should spend our school dollars on our schools. I realize that this is a radical departure from current practice, but desperate times require desperate measures.
The governor proposed spending $10,084 per student from all sources. Devoting all of this money to the classroom would require turning tens of thousands of school bureaucrats, consultants, advisers and specialists onto the streets with no means of support or marketable job skills, something that no enlightened social democracy should allow.
So I will begin by excluding from this discussion the entire budget of the State Department of Education, as well as the pension system, debt service, special education, child care, nutrition programs and adult education. I also propose setting aside $3 billion to pay an additional 30,000 school bureaucrats $100,000 per year with the proviso that they stay away from the classroom and pay their own hotel bills at conferences.
This leaves a mere $6,937 per student, which, for the duration of the funding crisis, I propose devoting to the classroom.
To illustrate how we might scrape by at this subsistence level, let’s use a hypothetical school of 180 students with only $1.2 million to get through the year.
We have all seen the pictures of filthy bathrooms, leaky roofs, peeling paint and crumbling plaster to which our children have been condemned. I propose that we rescue them from this squalor by leasing out luxury commercial office space. Our school will need 4,800 square feet for five classrooms (the sixth class is gym). At $33 per foot, an annual lease will cost $158,400.
This will provide executive washrooms, around-the-clock janitorial service, wall-to-wall carpeting, utilities and music in the elevators. We’ll also need new desks to preserve the professional ambience.
Next, we’ll need to hire five teachers, but not just any teachers. I propose hiring only associate professors from the California State University at their level of pay. Since university professors generally assign more reading, we’ll need 12 of the latest edition, hardcover books for each student at an average $75 per book, plus an extra $5 to have the student’s name engraved in gold leaf on the cover.
Since our conventional gym classes haven’t stemmed the childhood obesity epidemic, I propose replacing them with an annual membership at a private health club for $39.95 per month. Finally, we’ll hire an $80,000 administrator with a $40,000 secretary because, well, I don’t know exactly why, but we always have.
Our bare-bones budget comes to this:
5 classrooms — $158,400
150 desks @ $130 — $19,500
180 annual health club memberships @ $480 — $86,400
2,160 textbooks @ $80 — $172,800
5 CSU associate professors @ $67,093 — $335,465
1 administrator — $80,000
1 secretary — $40,000
24 percent faculty and staff benefits — $109,312
Offices, expenses and insurance — $30,000
TOTAL — $1,031,877L
The school I have just described is the school we’re paying for. Maybe it’s time to ask why it’s not the school we’re getting.
Other, wiser, governors have made the prudent decision not to ask such embarrassing questions of the education-industrial complex because it makes them very angry. Apparently the unions believe that with enough of a beating, Gov. Schwarzenegger will see things the same way.
Perhaps. But there’s an old saying that you can’t fill a broken bucket by pouring more water into it. Maybe it’s time to fix the bucket.
With a drop in numbers of illegal students, some school boards are cutting their number of teachers and staff members.
Liberal coastal cities are facing a shortage of school age children.
The price of housing and rentals in those cities are keeping families with children from moving in and causing many to move out.
Yet many school districts want to keep all of their schools open and not lay off any teachers inspite of these realities.
Ronald Reagan revamped the Federal retirement system in the 1980s. If states like California and Illinois had followed his example (fat chance) there would be no need to complain about their retirement system now. (They would have probably gone into massive debt some other way.)
The nuclear pension bomb is just about to detonate over Sacramento. There will be a 40% correction in the stock market in the future that will tank their pensions, which is already $175 billion in the red while the market is at an all time high. What do you suppose will happen when we see that 40% correction? What about the rest of the country? Their democratic led government wants single payer health insurance which will require an additional $trillion. Good luck California - God help America, again...
Send the bill to Mexico. Some schools in South Texas have 80% of their students coming from Mexico at U.S. property owners’ expense. That should never have been allowed, much less demanded by the lousy liberal Supreme Court in Phyler v. Doe in 1982. These black-robed morons should have foreseen that millions of Mexican children would become dependents of the US taxpayers, eventually driving our school systems into bankruptcy.
Instead of being ‘public servants’ its now the public ARE the servants. Outrageous $alarie$ and pen$ion$— just ask ILL annoyed how thats working out for them.
They will cut pensions to $50,000 a year. Teachers could move to middle America where they could live quite well for the rest of their lives on that annual income
Its not that they don’t know. Its just how long can they remain in office by being generous with money they don’t have. From social security to a postmans pension everything is funded with some mystical pile of money that will materialize tomorrow.
California and Illinois and maybe Connecticut should join in an economic union. That way they can reinforce each other.
Ridiculousness
Back in th day I called it the Sesame Street effect. Children’s television, which if there educational or developmental goals, should be teaching kids to think but instead it perpetuates the three year old thinking in 7 second packets. Those kids have all grown up and the younger generation of them are al running to their “safe spaces” on college campuses when presented with problems that require any sort of concentration. Their older siblings are the ones living at “home” at 30 or 4o years of age. It’s not only that there are few jobs but also that they cannot solve problems or reason. And probably the most of the population under, say 45- our industrial leaders and politicians, is that way. The schools devolved to Sesame Street techniques and we think we can take the Republic back? Ain’t gonna happen.
Awesome post
With democraps in charge of CA, what should be expected?
Amazing numbers.
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