School Tax and Local Politics

[andrewmitch]

I crunched some stats for my town and have estimated that 55% of the voters do not have kids in schools.

Which would mean to me that if a mayor wanted to get elected he would slash the Board of Education budget. But they never do. Does anyone here have any insight as to why this is?

[farmer_giles_of_ham]

because taxes dont pay for budgets. Budgets are approved by the financial system based on overall asset values- besides it's just paper so the only real consideration is political- and who wants to "hurt the kids"?

The state represents organized interests like 'public education', and the agendas that go with it, so that's like wondering why the pope is catholic.

Nobody passes a hat around to pay for spending- the act of expenditure creates the pay for hats. the purpose of taxation is to create demand for stories, distractions and employment.

[Friendsplacect]

I checked my local statistics last year from the Board Of Ed. They publish their Budget but they dont publish their own balance sheet so there is no way to know how much money they have in reserves.

But the Schools were crying for more money and claiming that they were conducting classes in the hall and used the kids to protest the proposed School budget for the year.
So I looked into some numbers from the Board of Ed Site, and there are 6000 less children in the school system from 1970-present. And going by the Budget its costs $15,500 per kid per year. Now some man told me that was cheap but when you compare it to Private Religious Schools they do it for $7500 per year. I dont understand how the Schools are over-crowded if there are 6000 less kids in the School System.

If you break it down to a per classroom budget and hire a teacher with a decent salary you can do it a lot cheaper than $15,500 per child per year, probably even cheaper than $7500 per year if you were creative enough..

There is a lot of waste with Free Lunches, at the risk of sounding racist, in 1970 there were 15,000 white kids in the school system compared to now there are only 6000 whites, 4500 blacks and 3500 Hispanics. I presume for financial reasons 90% of free lunch kids were black and Hispanic, 6% Asian and 4% White.

[andrewmitch]

OK, so even if the majority of voters were against the school tax that no Mayor would ever be able to successfully stop it?

The reason I am asking is because I think it may be better to petition the school budget to a referendum and then use the thing I hate ("majority rule") to my/our advantage.

[andrewmitch]

Friendsplacect - I noticed you are in Connecticut too - What County? Fairfield here.