How Sequester Cut Will Hurt Public Education

From our friends at The Stranger Slog:

Washington will lose approximately $11,606,000 in funding for primary and secondary education, putting around 160 teacher and aide jobs at risk. In addition about 11,000 fewer students would be served and approximately 50 fewer schools would receive funding. In addition, Washington will lose approximately $11,251,000 in funds for about 140 teachers, aides, and staff who help children with disabilities.


Comments

Anonymous said…
They will also loose thousands of volunteer hours as the part time working, and stay at home spouses of furloughed civilian government workers go to work to keep their families afloat. Congress is playing games in their ivory tower. Please contact your legislators and tell them to knuckle down and get something done.

-parent, who will not be a volunteer much longer.
Anonymous said…
What horrid news. Now what is going to happen to our kids?

Spedster
Anonymous said…
What will happen to SPS or is it too soon to say? My understanding is they don't do a good job tracking special education money in the first place so it seems that this will cause problems.

SPED Mama
Anonymous said…
I think everyone would agree that the sequester is a really dumb way of managing the federal budget, but it would only cut federal spending back to levels higher than the 2011 budget but lower than the 2012 budget. That's hardly the doomsday scenario being described in the media.

Skeptic
Anonymous said…
Skeptic, it is Doomsday if your family depends on a civil service job. You know, the people that keep the government working so the private sector can make more money.


-parent, who will not be a volunteer much longer
Anonymous said…
It's just the crisis the Ed Reformers have been licking their chops for.

Watch them couch their latest power grabs under the business-always-knows-best "efficiency" models, as they ramp up the campaign to replace teachers with computer terminals. See today's Times for Gates and Zuckerberg's latest snippet produced by the same person who produced Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman.

Get ready folks. The nightmare scenario is about to take off. WSDWG
erik tanen said…
Give me a break. We need to start living within our means. Eveeybody wants services and entitlements but we have been paying for them with borrowed monies. We need to cut back everywhere and do with less.Just taxing the rich is not enough. We need to raise taxes and cut spending across the board. It's unfortunate taut congress is not able to make the cuts in a systematic way instead of across the board, but at least the military is getting cut too.
And to the spouse of the civil servant who will have to go to work, are you kidding me.
Jan said…
How about this? How about we refund government? I was beyond impressed with Adam Smith's no vote on the fiscal cliff -- the reason he voted "no" was because the resolution of that crisis involved making permanent far too many of George Bush's disastrous cuts.

I can still recall frustrated arguments with those on the right at the time -- over the fact that we were fast turning a surplus into huge deficits (huge tax cut, plus Afghan war, plus Iraq war, plus new Medicare benes) -- and was told that Cheney and others on the right had simply announced that "deficits don't matter!"

It was all an orchestrated scheme to trash the federal balance sheet/income statement -- part one of a two part scheme (first, you create the crisis; second, you solve it by gutting the social programs that you want to get rid of).

The tragedy at the time, of course, was that we should never have agreed to the tax cuts. And we should have demanded that the counrty step up and fund the wars. But the right knew well that it is VERY hard for Democrats to argue AGAINST tax cuts, at a point in time when it is all "free" (when the future cuts you intend to social security, medicare, and medicaid are hidden over the horizon.

Why do you think they howl so now over even the slightest rectification of the tax situation (because that would undo their careful plan to loot the treasury first, and then plead poverty and kill the social safety net later).

We need to rise up and massively re-fund the government. Getting rid of waste and fraud are fine. Demanding economies of scale from bloated programs with no reasons to seek cost efficiencies is fine. But we need to unwind the tax cuts at levels far deeper than the ones set last January. Congressman Smith is correct on this one.

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