$273,000 boondoggle
For taxpayers who live within East Allen County Schools, state legislators’ rush to expand charter schools without considering the consequences of their actions is a problem costing more than $273,000. The school district should be receiving $189,000 for selling the building, and now must also spend more than $28,000 a year for at least three years to maintain the empty building. Incredibly, school officials must pointlessly wait, as the law requires, for the unlikely opportunity to give the building away.Bosma's comment, “It would seem under these circumstances that people should be able to get together and come to a reasonable conclusion that serves children” actually means that he doesn't care, because he and his "reformer" buddies in the governor's mansion and the Indiana DOE (as well as the Republican caucus, legislatures around the country, the White House and the US DOE) aren't really interested in helping local school corporations or the children who attend them. Their goal is to replace public schools with privately operated publicly funded charter schools and private schools. Every thing they've pushed for in the last few years works toward that goal.
Lawmakers’ cluelessness about the effect of their actions would be comical if the result were not so costly and unfair.
In 2011, the General Assembly adopted a law that requires public schools to make closed school buildings available for a charter school to buy or lease for $1 – for at least four years after they close. That law threatens East Allen’s plan to sell the closed Monroeville Elementary School to the local Catholic diocese to become the new home of St. Joseph Elementary.
No charter school has come forward to request the Monroeville building – and indeed, few charters exist in such rural Indiana locations. Yet the law appears to prohibit the sale.
House Speaker Brian Bosma wrote that law. After learning of the Monroeville building, he said, “It would seem under these circumstances that people should be able to get together and come to a reasonable conclusion that serves children.”
Is this an "unintended consequence?" It would be nice if it was because then it would just be people who really meant well, but made a mistake that can be corrected. Truthfully, though, I don't think so. I don't think they will correct this mistake because it does just what they want it to do. I think the consequences were understood. Do away with public schools...or, at best, leave them for the poor and the hard to educate...devalue teachers...drain money away from public schools and open the flood gates (no pun intended) so the "edupreneurs" can make a buck and fill the coffers for their campaign contributors...who, with the help of the SCOTUS, can remain anonymous.
I'd love to be proven wrong.
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Stop the Testing Insanity!
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