The Goat Pen

eCat wrote:last Thursday I attended a school board meeting as a sign of support for lacrosse.

So they did their thing and we all clapped and the board gave us an ambiguous answer on whether they would charter us as a school sport so we would no longer be a club entity.

Then after that they went into the financials. At this point about 90% of the people got up and left but I decided to stick around. Man did I get an education.

during the financial crisis, Governor Strickland came up with a funding plan for schools in Ohio. If you're school was deemed "affluent" - which meant you are solvent, they took a % of funding designated to you from the state (and via the federal government thru the state) and allocated it to schools that were impoverished.

Now on the surface that might make sense, but in taking that money away from us, we weren't going to meet our expenditures which resulted in 8 teachers losing jobs, 4 aides, a secretary and on top of that we had a levy which jumped my property taxes $260 more a year.

Specifically my tax dollars for schools at the state level went to Lakota among others in the area. And fucking Lakota has a artificial turf field. We just got a turf field last year and student fees went up to cover it.

Only last year were we back to where we had a surplus, and Kasich, the current governor has returned some of the funding that was allocated for us, but not all - we're still giving 6% of our overall state funding to schools (and Lakota apparently is the recipient of it)

No one was talking about this during the 2010 levy.

And I mentioned student fees. Of a $33m budget (I think I can't remember), $846K is student fees - money that parents have to pay for classes. For example, I paid $91 this year for my daughter to take an honors History class. EVERY class has some kind of fee associated with it - from $10 to as much as $150.

Yet we have a surplus of $1.3m. So I'm paying property tax, funding those fucking mopes at Lakota with state tax dollars I should be getting AND paying on average $225 in student fees for my kids to take classes at the school

AND THEY HAVE A $1.3m SURPLUS THIS YEAR

I see me running for school board in the near future.

Dora wrote:No.

hedge wrote:"From what I recall, the person who said it didn't really interact with you"

You rarely see that type of wisdom from internet posters...

Jungle Rat wrote:So you know Mook?