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| William Stonebraker - House |
I have received dozens of letters from students at Kaiser High School using the familiar rhetoric of the Department of Education. "Why does the government want to take away our creative outlets? Why don't you put more effort into getting money for education?" It seems the weighted student formula spending scheme is shortchanging schools like my alma mater, Kaiser High.
Ironically teachers and administrators from the DOE were the primary drivers for Act 51 which devised the spending formula. Now they have driven their students to do the political dirty work, demanding to know why I want to get rid of school librarians. It is laughable that a decision that is wholly the Department's is being used to draw unsuspecting students into the DOE's favorite past time, chanting "mo money, mo money!"
Education was the hot issue 2 years ago in the legislature. Scores were low, teachers were frustrated and parents were irritated. The DOE had been saying for decades that they needed more money, but where does the money go?
Records show that the number of non-teachers employed by the DOE has increased over the past 30 years from about 7,000 in the early '70s to 23,790 in 2003. Sadly only 6,362 were teachers. In other words, only 1 in 4 employees of the education system is a teacher. Look more closely and you'll find that while DOE staff increased 236 percent, student enrollment increased only by 3 percent (178K to 183K).
Per pupil spending was close to $11,000. In 2003, a study entitled "Financial Analysis of Hawaii Public Schools," showed that Hawaii was in the top fourteen of all states in per-student spending on educational operations. The same study went on to report that only 49 cents of every dollar makes it to the classroom.
The political battle of 2004 was between the Republican effort to decentralize the system into locally elected school boards for greater accountability. The DOE/Democrat effort was to "reinvent education" with new layers of complicated bureaucracy which could pass for accountability. They won. The weighted student formula that emerged seemed promising, but I was skeptical knowing it would reward lower performing schools at the expense of those with higher performing students. For instance, Kaiser High School budget has been cut by $813,000. And where have school officials decided to cut? The Library and Fine Arts.
In an historic move Democrats called for the Superintendent of Education to speak in the Legislature. In her bicameral speech, Pat Hamamoto said, "Give us both the money and the authority and…hold me accountable." (http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2004/Jan/28/ br/br06p.html ).
If my child was being politically manipulated to do DOE dirty work and to shift the responsibility, I would be livid. This is one reason my wife and I homeschool our children. Why are teachers misleading students into a political debate? Shouldn't they be teaching them? Maybe this is part of the problem.
Reach Rep. Bud Stonebraker, R-Hawaii Kai, via email at mailto:repstonebraker@capitol.hawaii.gov
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