Dolavim.us

Following up on the protest at Fowler last week, The Oregonian has a front page article today describing one of the teachers being laid off from Fowler. Both Mr. Rice and his wife are educators and represent a large part of Oregon’s population, being transplants from California coming for the livability of Oregon. They’ve both been laid off and are trying to figure out what to do…

School’s out for the day and I’ve just heard that today a bunch of students at our local middle school staged a walk-out over education funding cuts. Good for them! These kids need to do more…organize demonstrations, contact their state and federal political representation, regularly go to the school board meetings and city councils and teachers union meetings (assuming those even have any sort of public transparency), and even try to scrutinize some of the relevant/public budget numbers to find bad funding prioritization choices. And get on their parents to do the same. Given the economy it is no huge surprised that education is being cut this year to the point that teaching staff are being laid off, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Choices are made by the grown-ups to prioritize certain things over others and this is a prioritization choice. Choices can be influenced. Choices can be analyzed and called out when they’re unreasonable.

It’s just a sad state of affairs that there’s a tonne of economic stimulus money going around to create jobs that invest in the future of our country and fund shovel ready work, but at the same time we’re laying off people who invest deeply in the future of the country. We’ve got wall street banks that are too big to fail but those holding the governmental purse strings are seemingly willing to let our schools fail.