The headline sounds like the state would rather let children go ignorant than defund executive lottery administration positions. The lottery, however, is intended to support education, so taking money from the classrooms for executives should be all well and good.
Reading on, one finds the torture inflicted on the school systems is a prohibition on filling unnecessary positions that become vacant. One would expect taxpayers to give a flip if the law compelled them to fund unnecessary positions.
Also cut will be staff development expenses. This brings to mind some of the staff development meetings I had to attend in my teaching days. Fortunately, I was in math/physics departments where my colleagues shared my views. I recall one meeting where all were given a rubber band as a manipulative for some touchy-feely exercise. The physics teachers put theirs on their noses to make ballies while waiting for instructions. Then, there was another one where we sat in the back and razzed the television screen, trying to figure out what caused the illusion of the picture going up and down before the phenomenon was popularly discussed. This was all tax-funded.
Curiouser, the school year will end in about a month, and the draconian spending freeze will end in two months. But then, the governor is demanding less sacrifice from the Department of Public Instruction than other departments, and she intends to boost education spending in the next fiscal year, which should begin very soon. Curiouser and curiouser, the governor exempted “direct classroom instruction expenses†from the spending freeze.
Then, appealing to certain psyches to spend like there’s no tomorrow, the Office of State Budget and Management will require the unused portion of department budgets to be returned to the state.
