Originally blogged on 2/28/07

From: Dr. XXXX
Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2007 11:55 AM
To: bbeers@sen.state.nv.us
Subject: education funding

My name is XXXXXX and I have been employed as a counselor and school psychologist for Douglas County School District, Lake Tahoe, Nevada, for the past 26 years.

I have witnessed first hand the demoralizing and detrimental impacts of lack of adequate school funding on teachers, students and support staff throughout the years. In contrast, funding for prisons, appear to receive better legislative support — truly, a dismal, unproductive and negative direction to pursue.

Gov. Gibbons ignored any of the recommendations of a recent study which investigated the adequacy of school financing in Nevada, which revealed that our state needs to allocate an additional billion dollars to education by the 2012-12 school year. Please preserve funding to the Distributive Schools Account.

My daughter graduated with honors last May, 2006 from UNR. She is currently teaching in California since Nevada salary schedule for teachers is significantly lower. She is able to meet her financial responsibilities more adequately, being employed outside her home state.

Gov. Gibbons is proposing to do away with the funding for the 1/5 Service Credit Incentive Program, which encourages teachers to work in at risk schools and hard to fill positions such as math, science and special education.

In my capacity as the school mental health professional, each new school year, I provide services for a steadily increasing numbers of students, who are raised in homes where traditional family values have significantly eroded. They come to school with a myriad of personal and academic issues. These students are very difficult to work with. They take enormous amounts of time and energy from the school staff. Please vote for salary incentives for educators.

Historically, Gov. Gibbons promoted school vouchers.
Vouchers divert public school monies critically needed for necessary supplies, programs and curriculum materials. Please help by supporting legislation against vouchers.

Thank you for your time.

Dr. XXXXXXXXX
P.O. Box XXXX
Stateline, NV 89449

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Hi Dr. XXXXXX,

Please forgive me for not correcting your spelling, missing definitives, tense mismatches and factual errors, as well as your occasional run-on or fragmented sentence. Given your PhD, I felt unqualified.

Better funding for prisons than schools is one of the many lies perpetrated by Nevada’s education bureaucrats, just like “Nevada funds our schools last or almost last of 50 states.” We actually fund schools a little below the national average, more than a dozen slots above last, and pay our teachers and staff above the national average.

The monopolists’ “prisons lie” compares apples and oranges. Prisoners are incarcerated so as to minimize damage to law abiding society, for 24 hours 7 days a week, 365 days per year, and illegal escape beyond the razor wire is enforced with a government bullet. Schoolchildren, by comparison, are only in school 6 hours per day, and only 180 days per year. And while escape from monopoly schools is mostly illegal for Nevada families, we do not yet place barbed wire around the perimeter and shoot the escapees. The time comparison alone is quite telling - an 8:1 ratio of custodial time between the two institutions - and when the added cost of prison security is considered, the less than 3:1 ratio between per-student ($8K) and per-prisoner ($30K) annual spending seems a bargain. Total spending on our 400,000 students far exceeds total spending on our 10,000 prisoners.

You complain of Gov. Gibbons seeking to “do away with incentive pay.” This is especially disingenuous given that Nevada’s 17 county superintendents specifically requested that the existing at-risk incentive pay program be ended due to its ineffectiveness. Gov. Gibbons does not seek to do away with this incentive pay; he simply seeks to direct it toward a program that might be effective, in accordance with the superintendents’ request.

The story about your daughter’s career choice is quite interesting, given the net migration California has (and continues to experience) to Nevada. I like California teachers, and have many of them in my district. They seem pretty quick to flee California when they retire.

I remain at your service to offer alternatives to what you’re being told to write your legislators about. Thanks for your input, and thanks for your public service.

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