Friday, August 31, 2012

Why I'm Blogging Today

California's budget is in a shambles, and the faucet of money that funds education is slowing to a trickle.  If the tax increase on the November ballot doesn't pass, and it probably won't (I'm certainly not going to vote for it), then that trickle will become a persistent drip.

Today is a furlough day in my district.  There's no school, I'm home, and I'm not getting paid.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Darren,

Like you I am an educator who will be voting against the tax increases. I teach manufacturing at Bakersfield College. For the past few days I have been watching the facebook of Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, reading his summary of their marathon bill-passing session. In keeping with your fluid mechanics analogy, California is circling the drain.

Regards,
Jason Dixon

Ellen K said...

I just read a story in the Wall St. Journal about Ms Romero, a political reformer from California. She's a Democrat, which is shocking because she sure doesn't talk like a Democrat. Maybe you guys and other like minded Californians should look her up and provide some impetus to get her to a higher more powerful office. I'd love to see her run against Pelosi. BTW, things are weird all over. My district is using some odd mandate and simply sending every single disabled student-including the most severely disabled-into regular classes. I'm not sure what the idea is here, but with seven pages of reports per special ed. student to fill out every week, it's a burden. And it will keep us from teaching the rest of the students fairly. I'm sure it's money, although they keep trying to say it's some state mandate-which it isn't. Sometime you should look up the Texas Teacher.net chat board. East Texas Steve is probably one of my favorite sources for all things political/educational-after Darren.

Darren said...

The California Teachers Empowerment Network has some informal contacts with Democrats for Education Reform. They're Democrats, so it's impossible to speak to them about any other subject without someone's head exploding, but on the ed reform subject we have much common ground. I believe Gloria Romero is from Southern California, and isn't interested in moving to SF just to run against Pelosi.