woodstocktruth.com

Prop 46 Misconceptions

Admin — Wed, 02 May 2012 17:22:40 GMT

Editor's note: As discussed in the previous article, I personally will not be writing on this subject (or any other for that matter). However, I am always happy to post factual articles of interest when asked as I have been in this case by Dave Richardson. This piece is expected to appear in Friday's Villager and contains references to Mr. Baker's letter that appeared there last week. If you have questions about the post please contact Dave directly- he's in the phone book. Thanks,

-Craig R. Powers

Over the last several weeks there has been a lot of commentary about Prop 46 and the tax/spending situation in Woodstock. Prop 46 has been attacked for keeping a lid on spending with words like ”draconian” and “archaic” and its supporters referred to as “denizens”. Claims have been made that it has resulted in failing infrastructure and that it is undermining the education system in Woodstock by restricting spending – despite surpluses three of the last four years. I agree with Mr. Baker; time for some facts.

The table below shows Woodstock budgets, town and education combined, since 1990. It also shows what those budgets would have been if only indexed for inflation – the inflation index is based on the CPI (consumer price index) for the previous year. You can pretty quickly see that Woodstock’s actual budgets were considerably higher than the rate of inflation over these 20+ years, in fact, over the period the budgets allowed spending to increase at almost twice the rate of inflation – the difference over the period totals more than $73 million dollars more than what would have been needed to match inflation. Not too bad for a town with a budget of a little over $21 million dollars, at the end of the period. And all this happened with Prop 46 in place!

Another fact: one might think, based on what has been written that Prop 46 is the dominating factor in setting spending year after year; the problem is that going back to the late eighties I could only find something like eight times where Prop 46 was used to set the budget/spending limit, and four of those years were 2004-2007. And one is going to be this year! Over its history Prop 46 has not been the governing factor in setting spending – the voters have been. Another interesting fact is that even this year the spending limit is being set by the average of the last three years, three years which were not even close to the Prop 46 limit!

To address one last misconception not related to Prop 46: last week Mr. Baker stated that “state statutes require a seat on the bus be provided for each school age child whether or not they ride the bus”. Actually state regulation Sec. 10-220 titled “Duties of Boards of Education” requires that the Board of Education will “provide for the transportation of children wherever transportation is reasonable and desirable”. I don’t believe, even for the state of Connecticut, that “reasonable and desirable” translates into having more seats than students, particularly when they are picked up and brought home in two separate runs, morning and afternoon, each day.

Dave Richardson

Woodstock

Signing Off

Admin — Sat, 21 May 2011 02:34:00 GMT

After 3+ years of chronicling Woodstock ‘town governance’ and its silliness, I am setting down the pen and moving on to other things.

Woodstock as well as the State is in a bad place and we haven't seen the worst of it yet. The citizens of Woodstock and Connecticut have no one to blame but themselves. Blithely sitting by and failing to take action, is, and will continue to be not in your interest or that of your children. It will never cease to amaze me what the general public is unwilling to understand and is willing to accept without question.

The Woodstock Public Schools which years ago showed promise have deteriorated to mediocre at best, failing students on both ends of the spectrum in a continuing year over year slide on more and more money and declining enrollment, all of which are statewide issues. But the PR campaign here has risen to great heights in leading you to believe otherwise while protecting the less than mediocre administrators who should have retired years ago and continue to be vastly overpaid while mismanaging bloated and fraudulent budgets derived by hook or crook in combination with a board of education that is too large, with terms that are too long, that is entirely dysfunctional, and carries a legal budget that is the toast of Hartford. Then of course we have the blog of hateful idiots John and Becki Leavitt, cheerleading all the way despite the facts and attacking on command anyone who is brave enough to dare utter a word to the contrary. There hasn’t been a speck of truth published there since its inception, but there is your BOE gleefully supporting such nonsense in order to deflect their own failings- how noble. This level of dysfunction is mirrored in the shambles that is the state department of education as well, but at least McQuillan had the decency to resign.

Speaking of dysfunctional, well prior to the presentation of the budgets, I read with great amusement, an article in the Villager wherein Allan Walker was asked about the upcoming budget issues and how they might affect Woodstock. What followed disguised as an answer to this direct question was a rambling diatribe about how great the new Town Garage is. I will assume for the sake of discussion that you drove the roads of Woodstock after this year’s snows- they looked like a war zone. In contrast, the state roads, 169, 197, etc., were near perfect within hours after the storms- but you have a $3M+ palace designed around vastly outdated technology to admire, and the bill is coming despite what they tell you.

Meanwhile at Town Hall, that bustling bastion of Woodstock commerce, where it now appears that assistants are required at every level presumably to keep your elected officials company or handle their duties while they play Farmville on Facebook. Think I’m kidding? Have a look for yourself- eerily similar to our state legislators playing solitaire while conducting business which was revealed last year.

The dysfunction continues with the board of finance- you know, the folks that are in charge of the $20M+ and growing that you hand them every year and are supposed to keep spending in check, instead blatantly skirting and then covering up obvious violations of the spending ordinance to the tune of millions of dollars in over taxation, and when questioned in an open meeting said: “If you don’t like it, sue us!”. Prior to his whitewash in 'investigating' this fiasco with Cass and Cabana, we were treated to the immortal words of George McCoy: “We’ll worry about next year next year”. Earth to George: Next year has arrived.

Meanwhile, Glenn Converse, presumably the next chair of the BOF, gets his panties in a twist if anyone dares ask a question and reads from Robert’s Rules rather than engaging with the public to address the next wave of deficits that will be unavoidable, because no matter what Dannel is promising everyone with his delusional proposals to fix the state budget hole while quietly trying to legislate an escape hatch, it becomes abundantly clear that the short end of the stick is headed up your nose among other orifices.

The Woodstock budget just snuck by, apparently because no one was really paying attention even with the BOE continuing to threaten parents with 'cuts' and whining the same old refrain of having to preserve ‘services’ and ‘it’s for the children’; unfortunately, the administration and BOE could care less about the children evidenced by the ongoing lack of urgency in addressing anything meaningful. Some would say nothing new there and they’d be right. What is new is that the economy has changed for some time to come- perhaps for the remainder of our lifetimes, but the status-quo remains here at any cost. What’s important? God forbid we deface dirt roads with 'foreign' materials. The priorities here are just too stupid for words.

What should be evident to anyone with a brain? Pretty buildings and platitudes don’t make a community. Just take a look around and really pay attention to what your ‘leaders’ say and then do or don’t do- then ask yourself this: Do my family and I deserve better than this? I am quite certain that we do, but only you know for sure.

I have no doubt that I will be fully entertained while I continue to watch the comic tragedy that is Woodstock and the State of Connecticut from the sidelines for exactly 13 more months.

Despite all comments being closed, woodstocktruth and the Coalition site will remain for anyone interested in the vast amount of irrefutable data contained therein for as long as there is an internet- my gift to you.

-Craig R. Powers

Taxes, Taxes, and More Taxes

Admin — Sun, 08 May 2011 15:23:00 GMT

A couple of interesting things came out of the April 26^th board of finance meeting. First, it would seem that the vice-chairman, Glenn Converse, was somehow offended by the public raising questions concerning spending and the budget(s) at the April 12^th meeting, feeling that it became “heated and ugly”. I was at that meeting and if he truly felt that the questions raised or manor in which the questions were asked were either heated or ugly, well, that doesn’t bode well for future input by the public should he become the chairman next year as if he thinks this year was tough he hasn’t seen anything yet. Next year will start out with at least a $600,000 hole in the education budget never mind questions about state revenues.

But the bigger issue is the board’s decision to round up spending and our short term tax increase to an even ½ mil from the .42 mil increase going into this meeting – a mere $60,274. Hey what the heck, it’s just taxpayer money. Since then the state has gone ahead and adopted Malloy’s budget cutting your state tax deduction for local property tax by $200, or roughly the equivalent of an additional mil for Woodstock residents. But again, it doesn’t stop there, oh no. Malloy’s budget still counts on 1 billion dollars in give backs from state unions, something almost no one believes will happen; plus another $1.5 Billion in other tax increases. Plan B? Out on Friday May 6th, after cutting ~4700 jobs he will still be half a billion or so in the hole – so to make it up; cut Medicaid and aid to towns.

So to review: ½ mil from the spending increase plus ~1.0 mil from the lost tax deduction, that’s roughly 8.6% in increases. Then add to that something like $300 to $500 to cover the cut in aid to towns – you’ll most likely get that in a supplemental tax bill in August or September – and you get on average a grand total of roughly 17+% in tax increases just for local property taxes. That should go over well will those who are already struggling to pay their taxes. Remember that’s approximately 10% who are on payment plans according to the tax assessor and as reported by the board of finance in earlier meetings and many more using credit cards.

On May 17^th Woodstock residents get a chance to vote NO on the budget and send the message that enough is enough, or let it pass and suffer the consequences in silence. Your choice.

Dave Richardson

If Supermarkets Were Like Public Schools

Admin — Fri, 06 May 2011 21:49:00 GMT

An amusing and thought-provoking analogy from Donald Boudreaux:

Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education. Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. Nearly half of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build and operate supermarkets. Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address. And each family would get its weekly allotment of groceries—"for free"—from its neighborhood public supermarket.

No family would be permitted to get groceries from a public supermarket outside of its district. Fortunately, though, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer. Private-supermarket families, however, would receive no reductions in their property taxes.

Of course, the quality of public supermarkets would play a major role in families' choices about where to live. Real-estate agents and chambers of commerce in prosperous neighborhoods would brag about the high quality of public supermarkets to which families in their cities and towns are assigned.

Being largely protected from consumer choice, almost all public supermarkets would be worse than private ones. In poor counties the quality of public supermarkets would be downright abysmal. Poor people—entitled in principle to excellent supermarkets—would in fact suffer unusually poor supermarket quality.

How could it be otherwise? Public supermarkets would have captive customers and revenues supplied not by customers but by the government. Of course they wouldn't organize themselves efficiently to meet customers' demands.

Responding to these failures, thoughtful souls would call for "supermarket choice" fueled by vouchers or tax credits. Those calls would be vigorously opposed by public-supermarket administrators and workers.

Opponents of supermarket choice would accuse its proponents of demonizing supermarket workers (who, after all, have no control over their customers' poor eating habits at home). Advocates of choice would also be accused of trying to deny ordinary families the food needed for survival. Such choice, it would be alleged, would drain precious resources from public supermarkets whose poor performance testifies to their overwhelming need for more public funds.

As for the handful of radicals who call for total separation of supermarket and state—well, they would be criticized by almost everyone as antisocial devils indifferent to the starvation that would haunt the land if the provision of groceries were governed exclusively by private market forces.

Here's a Big Surprise...Not

Admin — Thu, 05 May 2011 23:54:00 GMT

Responses from the Woodstock Unions regarding wage concessions

If you expected anything different you were dreaming. Malloy has about the same chance. Your thank you note will be in the form of a supplemental tax bill in your mailbox later this year and I bet you're not going to like it...

The time to ask questions of your Superintendent on his budget and performance is now, not after it's passed. Just start with the BOE budget dump which is about to head into full swing this month.

More from Sir Ken Robinson on Schools and Creativity

Admin — Tue, 03 May 2011 13:53:00 GMT

If you enjoyed the video in the last article, here's more from Sir Ken Robinson on his outlook on what is wrong with the system in general and how it is not serving our children, our economies and our futures.

Particularly informative is a two part interview done with ABC in Australia in the links below where Sir Ken talks about, and gives concrete examples of how motivated administrators and teachers here in the U.S. and around the world that are finding ways to push the envelope within the structure and confines of our schools as they are today. Here's an excerpt from part two of this interview:

KEN ROBINSON: What great teachers know, what great parents know, what great head teachers know is that every school is different and every class is different. You have to create conditions where people give of their best. So I find great schools everywhere. There are some wonderful schools. There's a great school in Los Angeles, a brilliant teacher who's a theatre teacher, a drama teacher who's been there for over 25 years teaching a majority of kids who don't speak English as a first language. The vast majority of them now go on to college. And he teaches them by putting on Shakespeare productions.

What I find is that head teachers are critical in schools, like college presidents are essential in universities and in political systems. Leadership is really important from every point of view. I mean, look what's happening in America at the moment: that shift from the last presidency to the current one. There's been a total change of mood because people take their cue from the tone of the leadership. And it's true in every system I know. If you find a school where a head teacher gets it, anything is possible, and I mean that literally. A lot of schools do things they don't have to do because they believe they're required to do them, and they don't. I mean, I don't think - I can't speak in detail of all the legislation in Australia, obviously not, but I doubt that there's anywhere in the legislation for education in Australia that tells high schools they have to have 40 minute periods, you know, six a day, you know, over five days.

INTERVIEWER: There's probably a bureaucracy above them that tells them that.

KEN ROBINSON: There's probably an assumption it has to be that way. Or that science teachers can't work with music teachers, you know. Or that all these things have to happen every day. All the schools I know that are achieving a lot are prepared to question the routines they've taken for granted for years and try something else. There's a great school I know in - actually in the UK, a primary school, where the head teacher abandons the curriculum every Friday and they run a small internal university. So they have 30 or 40 classes available which any kid can go to, provided they go for an eight week series. But some of these classes are taught by the kids and the teachers go to them, because the kids often know more than the teachers do about some certain - some aspects of the new technologies, especially just now. So it's about finding freedom within the system as well as changing the system in the long term.

Discussions worth listening to...

Sir Ken Robinson: 'Education Systems too Narrow'

Sir Ken Robinson: 'More Creativity in Schools'

Another on his philosophy and findings...

Much more at: sirkenrobinson.com

What Should Education Reform Look Like?

Admin — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 21:29:00 GMT

I think the obvious answer is there isn’t one answer (you’ll see what I mean in the video below). I have learned one very important thing through my ongoing reading and research on the subject: It isn’t about money until there is vision and a plan.

The “factory” approach clearly isn’t going to work going forward (and hasn’t for quite some time). Moreover, I’ve heard many people liken the WPS to a “Prison Camp” (especially WMS) which is as about as derogatory as I think you can get when talking about a K-8 program. This doesn’t surprise me considering the pedigree of our current administration and the seeming lack of vision of our BOE. However, we have technology coming out of our ears and Smart boards aplenty with more on order I’m sure. My question is this: to what end- to bore our little inmates to death in high def?

I think we’re all pretty familiar with the factory approach mentioned above- it looks something like this through time:

…and it costs plenty. One might think that the results of this model would have at least some fairly dramatic increase to go along with the massive rise in dollars spent and all of these highly paid adults now running things here in the 21^st century, right? Wrong:

As you may know, recently there was a ‘Community Discussion’ here in Woodstock about how we might address these issues. Yesterday’s Villager had a report on what a great success it was. Despite numerous invitations, I decided after much thought not to participate. Why? There is one very large underlying issue that I know was not on the agenda, therefore making the entire exercise moot. We don’t have the people in place to execute anything other than what they now do no matter how much money they get or how much technology we buy. The bottom line is this- you can’t build a skyscraper on a swamp. Can anyone visualize Frank Baran getting his head around this or anything close to it?

I don’t think calling Shipman & Goodwin will be of help on this issue. But this is what we are stuck with considering his latest contract extension which was driven by the same person who championed the community discussion. Granted, the whole world is struggling with these issues; however, as pointed out in the previous article, we are WAY behind the curve especially here in Connecticut.

While a discussion needs to be had, I perceive this one to be misguided, the timing of it highly suspect as to its real purpose, and of course we still have the continued problem of a highly dysfunctional BOE without vision except for more money. Unfortunately, defending the status-quo, continued public relations stunts, happy talk, and budget shenanigans aren’t going to get our kids where they need to be.

-Craig R. Powers

Why Connecticut's Schools Are Lagging

Admin — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 23:14:00 GMT

What, Me Worry? Yes, you should worry. Your schools aren’t as good as you think they are.

One of the great mysteries of Connecticut is that its residents like to fashion themselves progressively ahead of the curve, yet such a self-assessment is wholly unsupported by the facts. In education, Connecticut’s performance is nothing short of embarrassing.

Connecticut education reform efforts lag behind those of most other states, notably, Florida, Idaho, New York, Tennessee, Rhode Island, Louisiana … and the list goes on. Here are a few of the areas in which Connecticut’s education policies woefully trail the rest of the country’s.

Ending the LIFO (Last In, First Out) policy for determining layoffs. LIFO ensures that some great teachers are fired while some incompetent ones keep teaching, and results in the maximum number of teachers being let go, since the newest teachers have the lowest salaries. Most Connecticut school districts adhere to this policy, and layoff ties are sometimes broken by the last four digits of a teacher’s social security number. In this formulation, quality takes a major backseat to seniority, which has been shown to have little correlation to quality after the first few years of teaching.

Teacher Evaluations. Most school districts in Connecticut have no rigorous method of assessing teacher quality, and consequently have no method for acting on those assessments. While school districts across the country are implementing sophisticated assessment tools (Colorado, Louisiana), Connecticut continues to employ and promote whoever is fortunate enough to get a teaching job. Some recent steps, such as the Performance Evaluation Advisory Council tasked with developing a model evaluation system, are moving in the right direction, but there remains a palpable lack of urgency on getting this done right and fast, with a focus on student outcomes. Why is Connecticut so satisfied with a quality-blind employment system?

Automatic tenure. While the rest of the country races ahead with quality evaluations tied to employment decisions, Connecticut stubbornly refuses to link tenure, as well as other staffing policies, to quality.

School Choice & Charter Schools. Connecticut’s charter laws currently earn a D. The state board controls all charter schools – there are no local charters, no local control, no consistent facilities funding, and no appeals process. Charter seats are funded on a separate legislative line item every year, which limits their growth even when they achieve strong results, especially with low-income and minority students. In addition, as of July 1, 2010, all teachers must participate in the (underfunded) state retirement system. Well, perhaps Connecticut lags in this area because of strong unions, unlike New York and Massachusetts, both of which have vibrant statewide charter school systems. Oh, wait, New York and Massachusetts are strong union states. So what’s Connecticut’s excuse?

Ending social promotion. It seems like a good idea that if a fourth-grader is semi-literate (or worse), then perhaps that fourth-grader should improve his language skills before proceeding to fifth grade. Research shows that if students can’t read by end of third grade, they are far less likely to graduate from high school. Florida took the lead in this area with a statewide policy that ensured students could not move to the next grade if they could not read by grade 4, and that those students received extra help. Connecticut has no such policy.

Closing the Achievement Gap. Connecticut’s non-poor 8^th graders perform, on average, 3.4 years ahead of Connecticut’s poor 8^th graders in math. We lead the nation in this category. A 2-2.5 year gap, which is found in many states, is bad enough – but 3.4 years? The fact is, poor and minority students are better educated in Florida and Texas than in Connecticut. Connecticut’s poor and Hispanic students are outscored by Moldova, and Connecticut’s black students barely beat Egyptian and Palestinian student scores. Our poor and minority students can’t outscore students from developing nations with 1/20^th the per-capita income.

When confronted with these issues, you may be tempted to conclude that some of Connecticut’s pitiable statistics are a result of Connecticut’s “best” students being so darn good. Think again.

Internationally, Connecticut’s highest scoring 8th graders score behind Slovenia, Estonia, and Poland in math on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). And these are our best students.

Nationally, Connecticut’s top students don’t score first in the nation in 8^th grade reading, science or math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Our top students place Connecticut in a 7-way tie for 5^th in Advanced 8^th grade science, with 4 percent of Connecticut’s students scoring at this level. That seems decent until one realizes that 22 states score between 3 percent and 6 percent, which leaves the overall picture of Connecticut education as fairly average. (Massachusetts, along with Montana, rank higher than Connecticut on that list.)

Only 15 percent and 14 percent of Connecticut’s SAT test takers break 600 on the critical reading and math portions of the test, respectively. All of our surrounding states crush Connecticut (25 percent of New Jersey SAT test takers break 600 in math), as do many other states: in California and Maryland, about 24 percent of students break 600 on SAT reading and math. (It’s worth noting that California tends to be one of the lowest scoring states on national education tests.)

Also on NAEP, our 4^th graders are in a 6-way tie for 9^th place in overall math scores, then plummet to an 8-way tie for 20^th place in overall 8^th grade math score s (tied with Maine, Idaho and South Carolina, among others). Massachusetts is first on both lists.

The picture is even more grim if we equalize for minority or economic variables. While Connecticut’s low-income 4^th-graders have scored about the same on the NAEP reading tests since 2003, Florida’s have consistently improved, increasing their scores by about 6 percent in the same timeframe, thanks to a visionary, long-term reform effort. This Florida comparison is particularly instructive because, in 2003, Connecticut and Florida low-income 4^th graders had the exact same NAEP reading scores.

The obvious conclusion is that Connecticut should be doing better. Many complain that Connecticut needs to spend more money, but the fact is, we already have it – we just don’t spend it effectively. Connecticut spends more on public K-12 education per capita than 47 other states, including Massachusetts. Connecticut’s per capita education tax burden is similarly higher than 47 other states, again including Massachusetts. And Connecticut boasts the h ighest state debt per capita and has for many years. Internationally, our best 8^th grade math students are being beat by Poland’s best, yet Connecticut spends over three times as much on primary education (using equalized purchasing power parity U.S. dollars).

How is it we spend more than most but get less? How is it our top students aren’t competing for the top position in most categories? Most perplexing, how is it that so few are alarmed?

Connecticut residents, it seems, have a remarkable talent for apathy. Our state budget, debt and pension funds are in the same fiscally disastrous shape as many other states’s, yet while they panic, Connecticut can hardly muster a whimper. Connecticut’s state pension funds will run dry the same year as Illinois’s and New Jersey’s (2018), yet no one sounds the alarm. Similarly, Connecticut inexplicably has the highest energy costs in the continental United States, yet few seem concerned (overall, energy is about 5 percent cheaper in New York, 10 percent cheaper in Massachusetts, and 31 percent cheaper in Florida).

We seem content to stand aloof with “What? Me Worry?” Alfred E. Neuman look s on our faces. While every state bordering Connecticut won Race to the Top, Connecticut submitted an application with120 blanks and lost out on $175 million in additional education funding. While every state bordering Connecticut has secured between $300 and $500 per student in competitive Federal stimulus competitive grants over the past few years, Connecticut netted less than $78 per student.

Some progress has been made, but so many who can could use their influence for good to be influential seem convinced that Connecticut can’t possibly have an education crisis (or an energy crisis … or any crisis). It’s certainly problematic that we’re not worried, but can’t, shouldn’t we at least be embarrassed?

You can comment on the original article HERE.

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About this column:

An insider's guide to the world of education. Nathan Allen, a Westport resident, is president of test prep nonprofit Blueprint for Success (www.bp4s.org). He has worked in just about every sector there is for college admissions.

Brace yourselves: Here they come again

Admin — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 22:27:00 GMT

Tuesday’s Woodstock Public Hearing on next year’s budget held few surprises. Attendance was heavily PTO/Teachers who decried “cuts” to education even though spending will increase by some $180,000 -- $95,000 in the budget itself and another $85,000 in the offset between expiring ARRA funding and Education Job Funds – a total of 1.2%. Only in government is a reduction of increases called a cut.

The real surprise came Wednesday morning when the headlines read “Malloy may target towns if unions balk”. Was there/is there any doubt that one way or another, towns are going to get hit by reductions in state grants? The state is broke. There is no money. State aid to towns is one of the top four spending categories in the state budget, and those top four account for more than 75% of state spending. How can aid to towns not get hit? Then guess what? Woodstock could lose as much as $2,077,037 – 2.62 mils. Ouch. Add that to the .42 mils already on the table from the BOF approved budget (so far) and you’ve got a 17% tax increase. Of course that’s not what it will look like when we vote on the budget. No, that’ll just be 2.3%. The rest will come in a supplemental tax bill that you can expect sometime in August or September when the state finally has a budget. Even if Malloy finds a way to cover half of that through concessions or layoffs, it could be a 9.7% increase. But don’t worry the Woodstock school system is hiring; at least one teacher and could be as many as three even though enrollment is going down from 917 to 907 according to Superintendent Baran’s plan and they already know that next year they are facing at least a $600,000 shortfall in revenue. Guess how long that job(s) will last?

On a more positive note; the town government budget is only going up $27,000 or .6% and this after two years of declining budgets. And when asked if he’d ask for more if the BOF would let him, Allan Walker said, “NO”. Unfortunately we can’t afford that either.

Time for spend, spend , spend to end. Dave Hosmer reported again that more and more taxpayers are having difficulty paying taxes due now. Payment plans and the use of credit cards to cover taxes is on the upswing – ten percent already on payment plans according the last BOF minutes. We need some assurance that if the state cuts funding, as they are more than likely to do, it’s not going to be a simply a pass through to the taxpayers; that spending will be looked at again. Remember this budget will come to a vote on May 17^th. That’s your chance to be heard.

Dave Richardson

woodstocktruth.com

Prop 46 Misconceptions

Signing Off

Taxes, Taxes, and More Taxes

If Supermarkets Were Like Public Schools

Here's a Big Surprise...Not

More from Sir Ken Robinson on Schools and Creativity

What Should Education Reform Look Like?

Why Connecticut's Schools Are Lagging

More Money is Always the Answer…But Not the Solution

Brace yourselves: Here they come again