Cobb County School District Budget

Warning:  This is a rant.

Yesterday, the Cobb County School Board passes the budget for the 2012 - 2013 school year, and to be quite honest the entire budget process rests upon the belief that we should NEVER raise the property taxes in the county.

Why?

What is so wrong with paying a little more money to provide for better education?  Are we so greedy and self-centered that we begrudge the school district a mere $50 more per household?  Is the future of our society too "distant" for us to at least attempt to plan for it?

Children are our future.  Period.  End of discussion. Cats and dogs, while wonderful pets, cannot maintain society after we are too old to work.  Flowers and perfectly cut green lawns are really only decorations.  HDTVs will eventually break down.  Computers and the Internet provide a modicum of companionship, but no face-to-face, hand-holding comfort.

But in our greed and arrogance, we refuse to acknowledge that children need help, need money to get a decent education so that they, the children, have a chance at a decent future as well.

I live in East Cobb, where people have money.  To compensate for the lack of funds from the school district, the parents in most of the local elementary school form school foundations.  These foundations not only raise money for the school, but several of them have professional grant writers as parents.  These parents write grants, thereby securing even more funds for the local schools to use.

But what about the rest of the entire county?  Why should East Cobb students have such a monetary advantage?

Our Founding Fathers did not fight the British to avoid paying taxes.  They understood that we need to pay taxes to maintain a healthy, growing society.  They simply wanted a say in what money was collected, and where that money was spent.

Where did that bit of common sense go?

Teach for America in Cobb County? A Mistake!

Earlier this week, I heard that the superintendent of Cobb County Schools, Michael Hinojosa, wanted to hire 50 teachers from the Teach for America program.  The school board was supposed to vote on the issue at tonight's meeting.  I felt shocked, to say the least.

When I graduated from Vanderbilt, I seriously considered applying to Teach for America.  It is a wonderful program that sends recent college graduates to school systems where no one wants to teach - mainly poor, inner city schools and poor, extremely rural schools.  Notice the common factor of  "poor".  By sending teachers to these areas, Teach for America helps students who might not get an education otherwise.

But we have teachers here in Cobb County.  In fact, I recently read that we had thousands of applicants last year - thousands of people who are qualified teachers looking for a job.  And Cobb County is one of the richest counties in metro Atlanta (I daresay in Georgia, but I don't know the facts for the rest of the state so I cannot make that statement with enough certainty.)  So why is our superintendent looking to hire from Teach for America?

To make matters worse, the Cobb County School Board announced at the last meeting that they would be removing teaching jobs due to budget cuts. (To read in between the lines here, they are firing teachers.)

So how could anyone justify bringing in outside teachers to a county with enough money to hire teachers and a plethora of teacher applicants?

And which poor school system will suffer even more because they won't have enough teachers?

Happily, Superintendent Hinojosa pulled the vote for hiring teachers from Teach for America off this evening's agenda.  I hope that the issue stays off the agenda, because no good can come from this course of action.