Budget-cutting theater takes center stage
To the editor:
As a former school board member in another state who can also read a balance sheet, I can attest that all these hand-wringing sessions at various high schools are just another call from the same old playbook ("Anger over cuts reaches fever pitch," Thursday Review-Journal). It's disgusting that such a scam is played out on concerned parents.
The administration hands the board a list of cuts that will have to be made. The board does a standard weep-and-wail arabesque and dutifully rubber stamps the list of cuts. The administrators set the stage to work up the parents.
Gotta cut those sports. That works up jock fathers. Hack music and art to provoke the mothers. Threaten bigger class sizes to frighten everyone.
Where are the real cuts in administrative costs? We can quickly restore at least $15 million by cutting out the regional-superintendent layer of bureaucracy. That fiscal monstrosity was strictly foreseeable when it was created by our previous superintendent.
When this system was set up, we were promised an independent performance audit of the regional program. This has never happened.
Keep the money in the classroom.
Kenneth Record
LAS VEGAS
Charity helps
To the editor:
All Nevadans have the right to be angry about proposed cuts to school budgets. An under-educated youth is crippling for the state's future.
As citizens, we need to become proactive in addition to letting the lawmakers and school boards know how upset we are about facing Draconian cuts. Every school, at all levels, should have community partnerships with businesses, homeowners associations, churches, synagogues and other groups. We can make an effort to supplement lost staff, needed supplies and crucial assistance to staff by providing our time and resources on a volunteer basis.
At Bet Knesset Bamidbar, a seniors synagogue in Summerlin, we have partnered with Adcock Elementary School, and it has become a spectacular win-win for the seniors, the children and the faculty. We aid with the reading program, we provide needed school supplies, we have funded field trips that were dropped, and we supplement revenues by participating in business programs that give to the schools without taking from their customers. Every bit helps.
While we still need to keep the pressure on for more financial support for our schools, we can make a difference as individuals. The emotional lift the volunteers get, the encouragement the staff members get and the caring the children get are benefits that money doesn't measure. We can be proactive and positive for our children.
Robert Mirisch
LAS VEGAS
No more bailouts
To the editor:
The idea posed by higher education Chancellor Jim Rogers, suggesting that if the federal government can bail out Wall Street, then it can bail out the state of Nevada, is a symptom of the opportunistic and short-sighted mind-set that got our nation into this mess in the first place ("Rogers makes revenue pitch," Tuesday Review-Journal).
Nevada and every other state in this union has the ability to govern itself. Making the argument to receive government money highlights our nation's slip into a sense of entitlement, which spells disaster for our country.
Federal money is not a rescue. In fact, it has diminished our capacity and even our desire to get things done for ourselves.
We've seen entitlement programs for struggling families sometimes do more harm than good. We've seen corporate welfare take over our country, which sickens us all. The minute state governments throw up their hands and say to the federal government, "You bail us out," I fear that what drives the character of our individual states may be lost.
Cathy Chappell
NORTH LAS VEGAS
Rein in compensation
To the editor:
Regarding proposals to balance government budgets, I suggest that public employees suck it up and take a pay cut. They are way overdue for some action on their obscene, bloated salaries and benefits.
These public workers and their unions squeeze our lawmakers every couple of years for free medical benefits and outrageous retirements. Our lawmakers, pandering for votes, buckle under at every contract renewal session.
It is because of these outlandish benefits and pumped up pensions that our state is in the fix it is in.
We in the private sector are on the hook for providing health care and retirements for the greed of the unions and their members. Many people in the private sector are paying hundreds of dollars per month for health insurance, but the cost to the public employees is zilch, and those who might have to pay up to $28 a month for their share of premiums are squealing?
Unions had a place back in the early part of this century -- to make sure everyone had a fair wage -- but when the public sector latched on to the union as their golden goose, it started the ruin of America. Lawmakers need to cut out those bloated pensions and retirements for the public workers and put them on 401(k) plans like many in the private sector, and make them pay for their health care like everybody else.
BRADLEY KUHNS
LAS VEGAS
