Recently I was in my car listening to the radio. What I heard over the radio was shocking to the point that had I still been driving, I’m not sure what might have happened. What I thought the voice from the radio said was that the Mississippi Legislature, in order to save money, was considering unifying some of the public school districts in the state.
Now, I know some of you are going to be against this because you think the bumblebees will not be able to play the fire ants or something of that nature. That is not what I am writing about. When I write about school consolidation, I am merely talking about the elimination of administrative positions.
There are a total of 152 public school districts in the state. If you add together the total students for each district, you still do not match the total number of students in Houston, Texas, which is an entire district in and of itself. If the city of Houston only needs one set of administrators to look over more kids than the entire state of Mississippi, shouldn’t Mississippi make do with no more than northern, central and southern districts?
Saving money shouldn’t be the only motivating factor in eliminating 149 of the current 152 public school districts across the state. There’s also a little issue of parental rights that I firmly believe in. It is currently very difficult for a parent to carry a child legally from the assigned district to another unless that parent happens to live in one district and teach in another. Eliminating 149 public school districts, or what I prefer to call evil empires, eases the burden of parents who need to carry children from the district in which they live to the district in which they work.
The real solution to the education crisis in Mississippi is to simply sell the school property and buildings to the academies in the state and produce a totally private, for profit education system in the state.
Since, at the time of writing this, it looks as though our illustrious leaders in the U.S. Congress are going to spend us into oblivion anyway, maybe they can expand the Federal Pell Grant Program to include primary and secondary levels of education to help with the private school tuition for all those less fortunate kids.
If you oppose school vouchers, you should immediately go to the government and make arrangements to repay that Federal Pell Grant. After all, it is merely a school voucher applied to the post-secondary levels of education.
Alas, I don’t even think we’ll get it down to a maximum of one district per county in my lifetime. The teachers unions will automatically oppose any attempt to eliminate any of the extremely top-heavy administration that, like a vacuum cleaner, sucks the money away from the kids.
If there is any real effort toward achieving this, I will do whatever it is I can do to support the effort and the children of Mississippi.
Kerry Hunt is a Parking Services officer at Mississippi State. He can be contacted at [email protected].