Sock Monkeys and Vodka

My oldest son just turned 5 last week – you know what he got for his birthday?
Stomach Flu.
Aside from that he ended up getting some Legos, some Wolverine stuff and a Kindergarten year that will now feature 50% more kids in a classroom.

Yes, the days of 20 kids to 1 teacher are gone in Chico. My 5 year old won’t be able to get his Kindergarten year of school back – it’s a one shot deal.

There are other options – people just need to think outside the box and be creative. Paradise did it – K-1st grade in Paradise are going to be 25-1, same with Oroville. The Chico Unified School District School Board has a litany of problems but they’d rather convince us that while we’re losing out of 20 to 1 the other districts don’t even realize they have a cash flow problem (“look – over here – something shiny”). I find that hard to believe that neighboring districts don’t balance their books.

Administration should be forced to take a pay cut. It won’t be popular and ideally it’s temporary. Apparently the Superintendent and her co-superintendents volunteered to take a 3% pay cut. I read recently that the Superintendent make $180k a year and the three co-superintendents make about $130k each. They’ll surely be hurting by losing that 3% – no question about it. Regardless there should be more efforts made to keep the 20 to 1 program that’s been in place since 1996.

Things have been mismanaged – that’s obvious. I’ve done a little research, talked to a few people, uncovered a few rocks and I’m already disturbed at what I’ve found.

It’s air apparent that the district has had issues for AT LEAST the last 4 or 5 years. A lot of people feel that the bond money hasn’t been spent appropriately. They think the answer is a parcel tax, the idea of further taxing the citizens of Chico is just foolish and unrealistic. It won’t pass – don’t waste the money. Then again, maybe you do think it will pass since according to the meeting last Wednesday when the projected budget was being discussed it was mentioned that the “current numbers factored in all of the Propisitions passing”. This floored me. Are you completely clueless? All of those (minus the one that froze pay for legislators) we’re dead right out of gate. Even Swartznager knew the propositions didn’t have a snowballs chance in hell.

The thing about that meeting that was the most offensive was the overall attitude of Reed, Kaiser and Rees. People know when you don’t really want to hear their opinion – I was shocked at just how condescending they were with the majority of the meeting’s participants.

They say “kids first” but it feels more like it’s “administrators and Board Members first”.

It’s my thought that an independent citizens review committee be established to audit every penny that the district has spent in the last 3 years as well as have a careful look at the intended spend for the next school year to analyze where the money has gone and where it’s going. This will also allow us to establish if there truly has been foolish spending and enable the public and the media to hold the individuals accountable for any misdeeds if any are actually found. At the least maybe it would spark some type of creativity in coming up with other options.

Maybe I’m off base but there seems to be a level of ineptitude here when dealing with spending the citizens money in a responsible manner.

It’s so rampant that there’s muttering of the CDE coming in to take over the district like they did in Vallejo and Oakland.

Maybe they’d do a better job.

Tags: chico administrators, chico teachers, Chico Unified School Distric, CSUD, Jan Reed, Kaiser, Rick Rees