H2Daddy
Shared on Thu, 08/09/2012 - 22:44As some of you know, I am a high school teacher. Wednesday was suppose to be the first full day of school. I did not have to work. We are $1.2 million in the hole and can't balance a budget. You see, I teach in a very rural town in upper east Tennessee (bring on the hillbilly jokes). We rank second or third from the bottom in the state on spending per pupil. We also have the third lowest property tax in the state. We pay $1.5069 and people want it lowered. The people of this town bitch and moan because "they are over taxed". Industries will not locate here. We have one of the highest unemployment rates in the state. The good ole boys run everything and they like it the way it is. One of the problems is that we have two school systems. City and county. City gets all the money because of all the business. I work for the county. We get squat. We have roughly 7500 kids in the county with 18 schools while the city has about 2700 kids and 7 schools.
Here is my question to you with kids, are you willing to pay higher taxes if it means the money will go to your kids school? What if you are in an area like mine where we pay almost nothing for property taxes? How much do you pay for property taxes? Should I just STFU?
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Submitted by XF1R3X on Fri, 08/10/2012 - 00:06
Indiana Property taxes are higher and county schools are funded by the property taxes from the county.
In Ohio when I lived there Where ever i lived, each town/county had it's own school tax. Usually around 100 - 200 per year .
kids need to go to school and I will leave it at that. I could easily go off on a major soap box etc...
Submitted by bi9_ca7 on Fri, 08/10/2012 - 14:50
i dont mean to hijack H2's blog, but im just curious.....
what part of ohio did you live in?
Submitted by Gunny on Sat, 08/11/2012 - 11:56
He's in Potato!
Sorry, couldnt help myself!
Submitted by Gunny on Fri, 08/10/2012 - 09:12
Submitted by H2Daddy on Fri, 08/10/2012 - 11:21
So you have to buy your kids books? Over half the kids in my school are free and reduced lunch. I can just see if we made people pay to register and make them buy their own books. Hell, they can't buy their own lunch. I say do away with buses. Area wise, we are the biggest county in the state. Our bus routes are huge. Don't know if this is true or not but I have heard it costs over $20,000 a day to operate buses. I need to do more research.
Submitted by Gunny on Sat, 08/11/2012 - 12:03
Its tough, we have kids on the same programs. Yet still required to "register". The only saving grace to a lot of us is we are allowed to break it up into quarterly payments. The buses? I think are a keep. We are extremely rural as well. Im 13 miles from town. Our routes are huge to, but some families cant carpool their kids as easy as us, even though we are down to one vehicle. We only carpool in the mornings cause school is on the way to work. In the afternoon, kids are bussed home and it works. Mandi and I cant take time off to pick them up and its one hell of a walk home.
Our problem, that others have refered to already, is our school board/system has a huge intake of money yet it claims its broke and cant keep smaller feeder schools open. But amazingly the football team(that sucks 1-10) the basketball team(that sucks too) have no problem with getting funding. My point.....the priority of the school system is FUBAR and I would bet is the same nation wide. Education is no longer the priority, popularity is!
Submitted by Automan21k on Fri, 08/10/2012 - 11:48
We don't have kids, but between the 2% income tax and 3.3% property tax which will be going up to 3.5% this year and the $50 occupation tax that goes to the distrect where we work, School taxes totals are pushing $10,000 a year for us. For 2 people who don't want kids, we are really not happy paying so much into something we will never use.
Submitted by H2Daddy on Fri, 08/10/2012 - 12:34
True but, whether you have kids or not, you need to look at the big picture. We want kids to become productive citizens that give back to the system, not live off the system.
Submitted by Automan21k on Fri, 08/10/2012 - 16:36
I would agree with you, however from what I've seen of my local school, productive is not a word they would understand...but in the past 3 years they have built a new school, new stadium, and have
missplaced several million dollars on more than one occasion...
Submitted by KoldfrontKraig on Sat, 08/11/2012 - 08:05
I don't think you need to STFU.
At least not about this...
Common sense would dictate that they combine county and city school into one large school district. Maybe get rid of redundant administration.
But then again, government never has had, nor ever will have common sense.
Submitted by Oldschool 2o4f on Thu, 08/30/2012 - 06:12
I'm in Carter here in NE Tennessee and our kids go to a school in the city because there is no county school in the area we reside. There are two city high schools and we actually get to choose which our kids attend. (no tuition required) We had to car pool them until they were old enough to drive themselves. That was a tad rough, but it was worth it.
Also, the entire county is tied together for snow days and whenever Roan Mtn. gets snow the entire county's out. Another reason we sent them to a city school.
I could go into the school politics of the teachers but that's a whole nother rant.
What part of Tennessee are you in? Sounds close?