Wait just a doggone minute.
I read this earlier today:
Now, wasn’t it just 2-3 months ago that Ken Martin, Governor Klink and Co-Governor Flanigan, the brodudes in the MNDFL Communications office and the chattering hamsters of the DFL Legislative caucuses telling us they’d “fully funded” education?
Why yes.. It was:
And yet they never actually defining what “full funding” meant…
…oh. Yeah. Now it makes sense.
“staffing shortages in schools”……sniff, sniff, sniff….
Smells like an Education Minnesota tactic.
I mean, doesn’t “staff shortages” sound kinda like “we need more staff, aka, union dues”?
As a former teacher I can tell you that it is student behavior and NOT pay that is causing shortages. The union protects only the teachers and couldn’t care less for the students. My blood pressure is such right now that I will stop writing.
There is a staffing shortage at the local fast food place. They recently raised wages to $16 per hour to start, but still can’t find anybody willing to work a crappy job for crappy hours. If they paid more – say $25 an hour plus more time off and a pension – then people would be lined up out the door to make fast food. And the restaurant could easily afford the increased wages and withholdting taxes by simply raising the price of the food a few more dollars to pass the increased cost to the customers. After all, customers will continue to eat at the restaurant regardless of price, having no other options open to them.
At least, that’s the reasoning behind the teachers’ union demands. Always need more pay, always need more staff, cost is never an objection because the public has an endless supply of money and parents have no other option to educate their children.
Which is why the union is absolutely dedicated to denying parents the freedom to send their kids to private school, or homeschool them. Vouchers are the death of the union scam and they know it.
It is never enough. School choice was supposed to hurt TUs but lo and behold even repubs are now opposed to it. I wonder why? TU’s are a loundering arm for the DFL and RINOs – they will exist as long as the US is a banana repubic, ie forever.
As long as you have money in your account, you cannot say that educators are fully funded.
there’s a legislative session coming in 5 months and off year school board elections this November so now is the perfect time to get the Mainstream Media & DFL PR machine cranked up.
Why is anyone surprised?
John;
I’ve seen a few fast food and convenience stores advertising $20 per hour.
The Cardinal Glass plant in Northfiield posted $25 per hour and $26.75 per hour for nights. One would think that some of those perpetual students at St. Olaf and Carleton, chasing worthless degrees, would be all over those.
As far as the criminal enterprise aka Education Minnesota, continually get more money, yet they still cry that teachers have to buy stuff out of their own pockets and send kids out selling wrapping paper to fundraise. Just another money laundering scheme.
What might help get more teachers would be to eliminate some administrators and other “leech staff”. It reminds me of bloat in some of the companies I’ve worked for–I remember once when a relatively minor expense, a trip to Asia, was approved at the 7th level of management from me. There were 3-4 levels of vice presidents alone. Whether they like it or not, that kind of over-management takes a toll on individual contributors like teachers.
Uh….before we buy school supplies like paper and pencils…..LET’S BUILD ANOTHER $180 MILLION HIGH SCHOOL!!!!!!
File RICO charges against Education Minnesota.
One of the most interesting ways of pulling for new school buildings and the like has been regulations on how schools ought to operate. A lot of buildings are being retired simply because of things like lead remediation, asbestos remediation, and manatory air flow requirements.
If you’ve seen a school that looks like a steel mill or oil refinery because of all the silver pipes going through the roof, that’s an attempt to get enough air flow for students without building a new school–and then the taxpayers take it in the shorts as administrators point to how ugly their schools are and ask for new ones, generally only a few decades into the useful life of the building.
There isn’t a strong correspondence between money spent per pupil and standardized measures of successful education. This is the truth.
bike;
Re your comment about administrative bloat, you are spot on! I’ve commented here before about that issue. For instance, as far as it can tell, the U has over 120 people in their HR department. About twenty are allegedly interns, but seriously; how the hell do they justify that many? Other stuff, like grounds maintenance, could be subbed out for far less money, but that would go against the leftist wet dream of total control.
In the late 90’s, I put in a software system for the U. For what should have been a simple task, I estimated 80 hours.
Silly me.
I should have estimated 80 hours in meetings alone. This was with my “advisory group”, which grew ever larger meeting by meeting. I soon realized that my project had become a dumping ground for aspiring administrators with nothing to do.
So I convinced them to split into two: an advisory group and a working group. The working group was just me.
80 hours later, I was the hell out of there.
Over a year later my boss called me in. I could tell by the smile on her face, whatever it was, was hilarious. She informed me that the advisory group was still waiting on the working group report to go forward.
They had no idea the system had been implemented.
Greg;
That is hilarious! It is also indicative of the blatant ignorance and fecklessness of the majority of public IT departments. Sounds just like state IT department.
Back in 2015, I did run into an exception at the City of Farmington. They had three people it their IT department, but all three of them knew what was what. My company implemented a VoIP system for them, over 8 buildings, with double redundancy, in less than a month. It would have been shorter if not for their carrier, Frontier. Now there’s a CF!
boss,
I did some work with LOGIS which is a consortium of town and country IT departments. At least back in the day, they were lean and effective. They are still in business, but I have no idea what they are like today.
Monthly newsletter from South Washington County schools, big write-up about students donating $1,000 from a lemonstade stand to support students and staff in schools.
The DFL completely owns the Minnesota legislature. They just finished a record-breaking session where every wishlist item was checked. Why are we having kids sell lemonade to give money to the school?
I got nothing against lemonade stands, but convincing them they must give away the profits is just plain unAmerican. Let them decide what to do with their money. They earned it.
Big, they may have earned it, but the “didn’t build that”.
Greg;
I know LOGIS well. In fact, a former colleague of mine has worked there since 1998. I saw him a couple of years ago and he says it’s being run by morons.
Farmington uses them and they were talking to them about a managed VoIP system, using Cisco gear. They were telling Farmington’s Financial Director that it would be over $1 M to set it up, then about $700k annually to run it. Plus, their admin had to get “Cisco Certified” just to do that. I made my living kicking Cisco’s ass and I did it there, too. I sold them a ShoreTel system, that all in, cost them $150k. My engineer also audited their Frontier network services, then moved it to another carrier. That move alone saved the city $5,000 per month, which helped pay off their ShoreTel system in about two years.
LOGIS wasn’t happy and there were a couple of mysterious outages during our implementation, that they tried to blame on us. Fortunately, one of the city’s IT guys traced the problem back to them. Things went off without a hitch after they were exposed.
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boss, sounds about right. Bureaucracies don’t evolve, they devolve.
I was working for the City of Minneapolis (MPD) when I encountered them, so maybe it was just POV, like anything was better. 🙂 🙂
greg
when I worked at Hennco the big get was to make your pension qualifying number at the county then quit and get a job at the city of Mpls “doing the same thing” so that when you finally do retire at 65 you can double dip 2 pensions.
The catch was “doing the same thing” meant producing shoddy, kludged software over and over.
PG,
I did 10 years with the MPD (IT, not cop) until it all became too much, then went to the state. That went great… wonderful competent motivated people, interesting work…loved every minute of it, until the last 3 years -then MNIT took over and I bailed. Just in time to miss the $160 million ship wreck that was MNLARS.
I felt like I was standing on the Southampton dock as the Titanic departed, yelling, “ICEBERG, ICEBERG” and watching them steam straight for it. But hey, who was I?, they were expert IT managers.
During my tenure, I ran into a number of quadruple dippers, who:
1) Work for city, county or fed and collect a pension.
2) Retire and switch to another govt entity, collecting yet another pension.
3) Pay into differed comp.
4) Upon retiring collect Social Security.
They make more money in retirement than at any time during their working life……but they still howl and bitch at union meetings at how they are so miserably oppressed.