Off The Editor’s Desk – 3-18-2015
YOU MISSED THE IMPORTANT SCHOOL MEETING!
I attended the first of two meetings the Glenwood City School Board is holding in regards to the upcoming school referendum. I was very disappointed that less than a dozen people, outside of school officials and school consultants, attended the meeting at the community center. However, you still have an opportunity to find out what is needed at the school. A second meeting is set for next Monday afternoon, March 23 in the high school library. Starting time is 5:00 p.m. Plan now to be there.
“GETTING MORE TIME OFF”
Last week on Monday, Governor Walker signed the “Right to Work” bill into law for Wisconsin and President Obama had to get his two cents in on the bill. The President is quoted as opposing the bill and stated, “Raise wages and give employees more time off”.
That sounds great, but it would break all small town stores that have employees and I wonder how it would affect the big box stores. Obama has no idea what it takes to run a business, or for that matter, what it takes to run a country, except to run it into the ground.
Now, as for getting more time off, a piece written by Dan O’Donnell came to me by way of one of our readers. His article relates to the amount of time worked by UW-Madison professors and what they are paid.
Governor Walker’s two-year budget calls for a $300 million cut to the University of Wisconsin System. System President Ray Gross called that ridiculous. Gross has an annual salary of more than a half a million dollars according to O’Donnell. Most of the professors at Madison have state salaries that are more than the governor’s, which was at $143,871.52 last year. O’Donnell also claims that the UW-System has a secret slush fund that contains some $648 million.
According to O’Donnell, a survey last February, of 191 faculty members at UW-Madison, those professors spent an average of just 14.1 hours per week in the classroom. But what is worse is that most of those faculty members made more money than the governor and worked only seven months a year.
No wonder it costs so much money to attend college and the president wants to make the first couple of years free. He better start looking into what we are paying the instructors, and ask for a full day’s work for a day’s pay.
I watched Governor Walker deliver a speech in New Hampshire last week, and one of the first questions that came from the audience was about Common Core. It finally seems that the evils that are associated with Common Core have got the attention of the population and people are questioning its worth.
The governor pushed the idea of having local government bodies making the decisions. He related that a dollar sent to Washington, D.C. sees only pennies returned for local use.
While we were vacationing in Arizona, I watched the local television news, and learned that the governor there had signed a bill that put an end to the requirement that high school seniors have to take a graduation test. Further I learned that a bill was making its way through the Arizona legislature that would remove Common Core requirements from that state’s schools.
I would like to conclude this item with a quote from Rick Manning, who is the president of Americans for Limited Government:
“When a student council at the University of California at Irvine, voted to take down the American flag from areas on its campus, because it is offensive to some, that decision is the result of an education system dedicated to anti-American indoctrination.
Rather than solely depending upon Congress to do something helpful, the people need to take back over their local school boards and demand that their state governments reject the far left curricula that pervades the system. This is not only about stopping Common Core, because those UCI students and others like them throughout the nation never took a Common Core class. It is about getting involved at the state and local levels of government, and fixing an education system that all-too-often pours national, suicidal poison in our children’s ears.”