WASTING OUR SCHOOL DOLLARS

The other day, a bunch of us old farts at the nature center where we volunteer were discussing the state of education in the U.S. Much was made of the fact that truck drivers are paid more than teachers and that football coaches are paid more than school principals.

When I said you could blame the high wages truck drivers earn on the teamsters union, my fellow volunteers disagreed with me. They contend that the trucking companies can afford to pay high wages because they will pass those costs onto their customers, whereas the schools can only pass their costs on by raising taxes, something the taxpayers are loathe to accept.

We all agreed on one thing – school districts in this country was a lot of money. For example, the school district in which I live has been on a continuous building spree for years and years. That is because NASA, which is within the district, has attracted an ever growing population. Every time a new school building goes up, its design is different from that of the last new school that went up. And every new school has to be more palatial than the last one that was built.

Some years ago, I went before the school board and asked them to stop using a different architectural plan for every new building that they were planning to construct. I pointed out that the savings in architectural fees alone would be quite substantial. The board members and the superintendent just sat there looking like deer caught in a car’s headlights.

They went right on building new palaces, each different and more palatial than the preceding one. And each time they opened a new school, the school board members and the principal would be there to publicly brag about what a wonderful building it was.

That’s a far cry from the high school that I started teaching at in 1954. South Oak Cliff High School was a brand new building, the newest in the Dallas school district. It was a simple design, square with a big courtyard in the middle. No palace by any stretch of the imagination. There was no air conditioning , despite the fact that it gets damn hot in Dallas.

Obviously, air conditioning would have enhanced the learning process at South Oak Cliff and no school building in a hot climate should be without it. But would a palatial building have enhanced learning? Not by a long shot, the exclamations by educators to the contrary notwithstanding. There is no reason why a building designed like South Oak Cliff, but with air conditioning, would not suffice today and it would save the taxpayers a ton of money.

South Oak Cliff had a large student enrollment. We had one principal, one assistant principal and one guidance counselor. The assistant principal was responsible for school discipline. The guidance counselor was there primarily to help students plan for the future and to counsel those with disciplinary problems. That’s not the case today.

In the school district where I live, each high school grade level has its own principal and support staff. The district has an army of counselors because school counseling has become a cottage industry. And there are an overabundance of assistant superintendents. It wouldn’t surprise me if they have an assistant superintendent for toilets and urinals.

When I went to high school, we experienced the same kind of problems today’s students do. Several of my classmates died in auto accidents. One of my classmates cut off a finger in woodshop. They laid his finger on the shop’s windowsill for all to see. We never had any counselors rush in to administer grief or trauma counseling and we all survived alright without it.

Do we really need all these counselors? Of course we don’t. Do students really need all that grief counseling every time a classmate gets killed, or trauma counseling every time a classmate gets an ingrown toenail? Of course they don’t. Kids are pretty resilient and in most instances will survive very well without the help of a counselor.

If school districts would stop building palaces, stop being top-heavy in administrators, reduce the number of principal personnel, get rid of most counselors and reduce the ridiculous salaries of coaches, they would be able to pay their teachers better salaries while saving the taxpayers a bundle of money. And none of those cuts would be detrimental to the educational process.