Save Our Schools

Populist and emotional arguments are always the greatest at throwing elected officials into a hissy-fit. When large groups of people are mad, elected officials scramble around to prove they are 'one of the people' by parroting the calls from the crowd whether honest or not. This can easily be seen in two places on your television screens right now. One is the hyped elected official anger at the failed corporation of AIG, and the other, a little bit closer to home, is the statewide public school system budget crisis. Both issues seem to require taxpayer funded bailouts on agencies that are supposedly too big to fail, while at the same time demand taxpayer outrage at ridiculous levels of mismanagement that have gone unchecked for years. While the WayneWho staff usually tries to avoid writing un-news articles of issues outside of our county, the Osceola News-Gazette's backing of a sales tax hike for schools demands some discussion.

In Osceola County, we have been down this road before. We know where a discussion on raising the sales tax to support our schools will lead. The discussion will lead to someone finally digging through the budgets of the different schools systems and discovering the wasteful spending that has gone on for far to long. If raising the sales tax in the State of Florida is going to require a vote by all of our residents, then the WayneWho staff is onboard with putting it on the ballot and letting the voters decide because then the truth will finally come out. Give the school systems their chance to make their arguments for not only why they need this money, but for how they are going to spend it wisely. Let them make their case for what kind of accountability they have had with the money they have already spent, and what type of accountability they are going to have with the money they are going to spend in the future. To us, this is a fair and honest way to address the situation before us. This is what happened in 2004 when the Osceola County voters shot down a "half penny" sales tax increase because they saw that the school system could not account for the money it was spending and that wasteful spending was rampant.

Of course this is not what is about to happen. What is about to happen is that the school systems are going to use children as human shields to protect their funding. They are going to scream and cry that we have to protect teachers while they refuse to layoff administration staff to help balance their budgets. They are going to whine about the quality of education while they waste millions of dollars on technology items that may or may not actually benefit the education of our State's children. Like AIG, it will look like we are facing impending doom if we do not throw more money at the problem. But amazingly, just like AIG, you will see the well paid actors representing the company doing things that do not match the urgency of the crisis. Yesterday, while the news that Orange County's budget deficit was going to double, Superintendent Ron Blocker enjoyed some time off and then was finally tracked down by reporters at an awards ceremony. Things must be bad right?

Here is our issue. Before we allow an angry mob of good hearted people scare the state into making a decision on increasing all of our taxes without proper intelligence, lets get some facts. We know this is a foreign idea to media outlets like our local newspapers, but we believe that we will only make the situation worse if decisions are made without all of the facts on school budgets being taken into account. We call for independent audits of all public school systems in the State of Florida to determine if proper and wise spending patterns have been practiced. Once we can all see that the schools are, for the most part, spending our money wisely, we can then begin to figure out what revenue solution would be best. To blindly support a sales tax increase is not the best solution. Adjusting the revenue stream to give a more balanced and steady income should be the solution that is demanded by all Florida residents. Slapping an additional tax would only lead to the public school systems being able to 'double dip' when property taxes come back in line as home values stabilize and begin to rise again. We would also argue that if the State is going to raise the sales tax for schools, then all local counties who are already using sales tax money for schools be forced to bring their local option taxes back to the voters. Basically what we are saying is that this is a complex issue that requires more than a knee-jerk reaction to solve. Maybe the best way to 'Save our Schools' is to stop and think.