Where Have all the Greenbacks Gone?

The next time that you hear a teacher whining about how little they're paid, or how they're spending their own money in the classroom, think about this:

Here in Minnesota we spend half of the state budget on education. Half of every dollar that i give to the state government in taxes goes to education. Half! When is it going to be enough?

That means that in this state we spend about $10,000 per child per year.

I went through my daughter's yearbook and counted the number of students per classroom. There about 20 in each class. The number is actually a bit hgher, but we'll stick with that for simplicity's sake.

If you multiply that $10,000 by the 20 students, you get $200,000 per classroom! $200,000 to run a room that's half the size of my house! Every year!

My daughter's school isn't that big. There are about 30 classrooms in it.

Multiply that $200,000 by the 30 classrooms, and this school is running on $6 million per year. $6 million! $6,000,000 to run this dinky little elementary school!

Alright, so let's talk about teacher's salaries for a moment.

Let's say that each of these 30 teachers is making about $45,000 per year (for working eight months out of that year, I might add). And we'll add 10 additional staff for secretaries, custodians, etc.

So if you take those 40 staff members and multiply it by $45,000 you come up with $1,800,000 per year in salaries for the employees of this school.

Subtract that from the $6,000,000 from above and you wind up with $4.2 million dollars that's unaccounted for.

OK, so where could that money be going? Granted, they need to charter school buses, And buy new books every few years. I'll even give them 10 administrators in the district office. It shouldn't take more than that to run this little school. Utility bills are a cost, but I know what it costs to run a building 4 times the size of that one, and it doesn't put a dent in $4.2 million.

But they have the physical building, they have the desks and chairs, they have all of the computers and AV equipment, all of the gym equipment, all of the playground equipment, I can't think of anything major that they need to buy.

And when you factor in the fact that most of the supplies are "donated" by the parents, you can't even factor that in. I put "donated" in quotation marks because, what really happens, is that you're sent a list of things that "your" child "needs", and when you bring the stuff to school the first day, the first thing they do is collect it all and put it in one big communal bucket for all of the kids to use. And I do use the word "communal" with full knowledge of the implication of that word. The school is, after all, crawling with Lefties.

(I bought the cheapest garbage that I could for the list, and then loaded Monkey Girl up with the cool stuff for her own personal use. Piss on them.)

You also have the parent volunteers, who do much of the planning of events and activities, so the school isn't paying for that, either.

And I'm sure that there are a few things that I've forgotten, so let's be very generous and give them half of that $4.2 million for expenses. That leaves $2,100,000 completely unaccounted for. Where's it going?

Easy. Instead of the 10 administrators that it takes to run the place (and that's being generous, too) there are probably 40.

They're using all of this money to hire unnecessary workers to jack up their union rolls, which buys them more clout in the Legislature, which gets them even more money to hire even more unnecessary workers to jack up their union rolls even higher, which buys them even more clout in the Legislature...and pretty soon half of every dollar sent to the government goes to education.

So the next time that you hear a teacher whining about their salary, or how they're spending their own money in the classroom, you tell them to quit whining to you, and go whine to their union representative.

If they'd quit playing politics, and start putting the money that we give them towards the causes that we give it to them for, they could double the teachers' salaries and cut class sizes in half.

But if they did that, they wouldn't be able to hire more unnecessary workers to jack up their union rolls. Like all good Democrat problems, no matter how much they whine, they don't want it solved. They just want more of your money.