High cost of education
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In My Humble Opinion
Jodi McDade
As our Alabama Legislature is going into its final days of this session, it’s time for them to pass the budgets that will take effect on October 1. They are almost always the last things that are approved.
We have two separate budgets – one for education (the Education Trust Fund) and one for everything else (the General Fund). This year the ETF is looking at an increase of 5.81% over last year. It will increase by $543.3 million to a total of $9.89 BILLION! The main budget increases go to increase programs like the Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative.
While that sounds good, what about funding to help the students improve their reading and math skills to at least their grade level? If kids can’t read, they can’t learn anything else.
Before I go further let me compare this to the General Fund budget that pays for EVERYTHING else! It will increase by about 10% over last year to $3.7 BILLION. STOP THERE!
Now, remember when I said this General Fund budget covers EVERYTHING except education? It includes the Ala. Law Enforcement Agency, Ala. Dept. of Corrections, Ala. Dept. of Transportation, Ala. Dept. of Human Resources, Ala. Dept. of Mental Health, and the Ala. Medicaid Agency, to name a few. Now, compare that $3.7 billion for the General Fund to the $9.89 billion for ETF only. Can you wrap your head around that?
Now I’ll throw something else out there. Of that $3.7 billion for the entire General Fund, the Alabama Medicaid Agency will get a 19% increase to $1.179 billion. That in itself alone is almost 30% of the ENTIRE General Fund budget!
I appreciate what this agency was set up to do – help elderly and disabled citizens, children in homes under the poverty level, health care and health care insurance, food stamps, in addition to many other things. There are currently more than one million people being helped by Medicaid. So, how many of those people are illegal immigrants that do not even pay into the system?
I’m back to the ETF now. Do you really think that you are getting your money’s worth? There are reportedly about 912,000 students in our K-12 public schools, colleges and universities. That works out to about $1.086 million per student annually. Granted some schools receive more funding than others; overhead and salaries are included in this, plus building and upgrades. But keep in mind that all these dollars come from taxes mandated on our citizens.
Eric Mackey, the Alabama state superintendent of education, received a $32,500 raise this year. He now receives $325,000 per year. Almost every county School Board superintendent in Alabama also received significant increases in salary this year. So did School Board members and employees of the county School Board.
I have found that teachers got a 2% increase in salary last year, but will receive no increase in this budget. The average pay for a teacher in Alabama is $52,120 with the highest salary in the state at about $65,000. In MY HUMBLE OPINION, teachers should be paid over $100,000 per year for what they have to put up with! Disruptive children, threats, students who have been passed and passed without meeting standards, and irate and non-involved parents.
All of this has been going on for years. The distribution of taxes heavily favors education over the services that people should be able to count on from our state government. I would love to see a DOGE agency put in place with a mix of businesspeople and regular citizens to look into how our state operates.
DOGE is working at the federal level and cleaning out waste and fraud. We need that here, also! We keep seeing reports of state, county and city employees being arrested and indicted for stealing public funds.
I know from experience that there are many state employees who would be fired immediately if they were at a private company. But the system protects them and makes it virtually impossible for a supervisor to fire them.
I certainly don’t have the answers, but I wish I thought I would live long enough to see our governments at every level be more supportive of the citizens/taxpayers than they are to their cronies and their own pockets. And THAT is a topic for another day!
God bless you all – and please pray for our county, state and nation.
