Just two of the 16 Charlotte-Mecklenburg at-large school board candidates showed up at the Tuesday Morning Breakfast Forum today - Elyse Dashew, Aaron Pomis, Ericka Ellis-Stewart, Tim Morgan, Mary McCray and Hans Plotseneder attended last week - but there was a spirited conversation nonetheless.
One hot-button item was whether the school system should have taxing authority. Candidate Lloyd Scher was for it; candidate Larry Bumgarner was against it.
Scher said he thought the school board needed to be directly accountable for the money it spends. He also said he'd support two year terms of school board members - the length of city and county terms - if they got taxing authority so voters could get rid of them sooner if they didn't like the way they spent money.
Bumgarner fired back that no one likes the way they're spending money now, and he liked having controls on how the money was spent with Mecklenburg County having the authority to levy taxes to support schools. (He's talking about local tax dollars; most of the money to support schools comes from the state.)
Taxing authority also came up last week at a forum where 12 of the 16 candidates appeared. The question was posed to only a portion of the candidates but most including current district school board member Tim Morgan, now running for an at-large seat, supported the school board having its own taxing authority. Morgan supports it as well only if school board members had two year terms.
What do you think of the school board having taxing authority?
I'm not sure who from the editorial board wrote this Daily View but apparently the author was at today's forum. I understand that most of those in attendance today did not believe that suburban schools receive a much lower per pupil allotment than high poverty schools. Nor did they believe that many suburban classes had 35+ students in them. As an editorial page editor or associate editor I'm sure you must by now know that the urban schools receive a much higher per pupil allotment than the suburban schools and that last year suburban schools had very crowded classrooms. Did you speak up when folks in the room denied that this was happening?
ReplyDeleteFannie Flono was the concierge writer for this Tuesday Morning group from the Observer.
ReplyDeleteAnd as far as taxes, believe it or not, I do know were taxes come from having paid them and a lot of them for quite some time.
Yes I talked about local and all kinds of taxes and how they are running down our whole City. And it is strange she is discounting the taxes CMS gets from the county which is local?
But since this group does not believe that Urban Kids get 10K and Suburban Kids get 4K and just want more for Urban kids I guess she can just discount it as nothing.
Anyway you will see the full discussion on this site of theirs very soon http://www.tueforumclt.org/.
You will will also hear from the meeting everything I quote, saying things like which schools are over capacity mainly classes and schools in the suburbs and not at West Charlotte for example which is my old school.
So thank you Fannie it was great to see you at the meeting and the one from the night or so before that at the Church on Beatties Ford Road.
Too bad we couldn't have gotten rid of Lloyd Scher sooner than we did years ago. He served 8 years, 7 too many.
ReplyDeleteWhen politicians are in protected districts, like Vilma Leake and Geroge Dunlap, who used to be on the BOE and now DO having taxing authority, getting rid of them is impossible.
CMS has failed miserably managing the money they do get. The County has even asked for a refund in the past due to overstating enrollment.
We have bond monies that have yet to be spent and monies that were approved to build schools in the wrong places or were overcrowded before the doors opened.
CMS taxing authority is one issue that if legs start to grow on this, they need to be cut out from under it immediately.
So Fannie was there and heard forum attendees deny that the suburban schools receive many fewer dollars than urban schools and that suburban classes are overcrowded. I trust in tomorrow's column she will correct these "misperceptions". After all, she and other editorial board members had nothing to do with how CMS spending is perceived by the public. They never claimed inner city schools were being treated unfairly--right?
ReplyDeleteActually they embrace the idea of Urban Children getting three to one over Suburban Kids as enlightened.
ReplyDeleteIn fact many of the groups I have had the privilege of attending an event with, and almost all of those running for with me have all said this is fair and necessary.
This is what I call group think.
You know where since it what the group thinks you really do not want to change the flow of thought.
Perhaps that is the problem with my ideas of Education, people should have ideals outside the groups and dreams that extend beyond boundaries that we have never even conceived in our minds.
How many of us have even see or heard of swarmbots. These are the kinds of things I want to teach our kids to embrace for the future.
That is why my ideas of choice of vouchers, charter schools and what ever works is just too far afield from the failures we have called the public government operated system we know and has not worked for decades.
So is it sad they do not do any editorials on the real stories about our schools.
Another taxing authority in Charlotte? Notably the fools on the BoE? Hello SC!
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