October 2008 Archives

It’s a Hamburger Helper World we’re living in these days. Times are hard and budgets are tight. People are eating out less and clipping coupons more. The weekly newspaper's Food supplement is featuring “stretching your food dollar” rather than “expanding your epicurean sensibilities.” While eating is a necessity, where we eat and what we eat is discretionary, so when a dollar needs squeezing, the food budget is one of the first categories to take a hit. Unfortunately, a lot of policymakers put education spending in the same category as food budgets. They know that public education is a ...

Lately there is a miasma of stress that hovers in the halls of my school and community. In a high speculative and very expensive real estate market, property values have dropped precipitously, leaving more than a few mortgaged folks with a negative value. The stagnant building industry and retail market will leave some of our students' families without work. Property taxes are our primary funding source for education, so we are looking at draconian cuts on top of last year’s merely drastic cuts. As a suburb of Washington, we live in the shadow of the Capitol and the Pentagon. ...