Close school district police

That Schools Superintendent Walt Rulffes would rather not lose staff that took years to recruit and train makes some sense: If workers will accept pay concessions during lean times, at least the district won't have to go into "recruitment mode" to replace them later on. (See above.)

But the school district was never supposed to be a giant jobs program.

Take the school district police. Please. Mr. Rulffes and his staff bristle at the prospect of eliminating this gang of glorified hall monitors, insisting "the safety of our schools is very important."

The safety of churches and supermarkets are also pretty important, but taxpayers don't fund separate "church police" and "food police."

Criminals invading our schools to bring crime in from outside are not a big problem. If there's crime in the schools, then the perpetrators from whom our students need protection nearly always comprise a minority of their fellow students, and the solution is not to staff each high school with a pair of not-quite-up-to-Metro-standards hall monitors, but rather to get more serious about expelling the troublemakers.

If the school district is serious about trimming costs and reversing decades of empire building, start by eliminating the 150 sworn personnel and who-knows-how-many administrative secretaries and motor pool liaisons (Would you believe there's actually a "quartermaster" and a "fingerprinting unit"?) of the Clark County School District Police Department. Doing so would save the school district about $18 million per year.