John Dick, Monroe County School Board member, joined Good Morning Keys this morning on KeysTalk 96.9/102.7FM to talk about our schools.
Superintendent Theresa Axford will be retiring soon and the search for a new superintendent is underway.
Dick said, “We contracted with the Florida School Board Association to help us go through the program on that because they’re well versed in doing it over the years. They’re having meetings with the community to see what they want from the superintendent. So they’re doing things in all three communities, Key West, Marathon and the Upper Keys.”
On February 11, at 6 p.m., they will be at Coral Shores High School. On February 12, at 6 p.m. they will be at Marathon High School. On February 13, at 6 p.m. they will be at Key West High School.
Dick said, “They don’t want the school board members going to those because they want the people to say what they feel, and they gather the information and bring it to us and I understand that. Of course, we’ve already been speaking with them, and we’ll go over what we want out of the superintendent. You know what we want? We want a superintendent that’s going to move the district forward. That’s what we want, and save us some tax dollars.”
There is also a survey online as well.
Dick said, “It doesn’t take long to fill that out.”
The school board will meet tomorrow in Key West.
Dick said, “We’re going to start at 4:30. We have a little bit of a workshop where we’re working on that affordable housing thing in Trumbo, and we’re going to put it out for another re-bid, because things just didn’t work out so far. There’s always something coming along to put a put a roadblock in front of housing, but eventually, I’m sure something’s going to happen. Then we do have the evaluations on the on the meeting, the evaluations of the superintendent, so we’ll be discussing that. We’re going to pay for our approval of our insurance for our buildings, the wind insurance, flood insurance, which very expensive things for us. We’re going forward on our charter schools, the Sigsbee is up for a contract renewal. It looks like it’s pretty straightforward, and there shouldn’t be any issues. Sigsbee has been doing a good job for us. One thing that’s on the report that used to be a big problem, but last couple of years, it hasn’t been, and hopefully it goes through smoothly again this year is the calendar. Everybody seems to have a way that they can fix it and make it better, but there are always issues, and there’s a fight between, I guess the high school teachers or staff, and people in the community want to see the first semester end before the Christmas break, and others don’t want that. So that’s a fight that we’ve had over the years, but that seems to have been settled out lately and then, of course, they argue about which holidays, but one I’m very proud that we do is we have Veterans Day off, which not every district does that, but we do.”
President Donald Trump is looking to potentially do away with the federal Department of Education.
Dick said, “Look, he’s not the first president or administration to have their eyes on the Department of Education. That was created, I think, in Jimmy Carter’s presidency, and the purpose of it was to lower the achievement gap between the top students and the bottom students, the students that were scoring the least, and they blamed most of that on poverty. So okay, they were going to solve that. Well, it’s far worse now than it was in 1975. They’ve accomplished absolutely nothing, and what have they done? They’ve spent a lot of money. They spend on most years it was running around $200 billion. It got up to $600 billion two or three years ago, but let me say one thing about that, the vast majority of the money that the Department of Education spends, it spends on Pell grants for helping the young people, go to college, and that’s a good thing. I have nothing against that, but that’s the vast majority of it, and that should continue. However, the reason it went from $200 billion to $600 billion is that was the previous administration wanted to pay off everybody’s debts, which, that’s problematic to me. I don’t know why we’re doing that, but as far as I went through the budget of them, and I looked what do they actually send to the schools around the country? Then I took that amount, separated that from their total budget, there’s a couple of different categories that they send to the schools, and then there’s 51 point something million students in public schools in the United States. If they gave that money to the schools, it would come out to about $1,100 for each student in the schools in the United States. So for us, that that would be, oh, maybe somewhere between $8.5 to $9 million and I think with $8.5, $9 million, we could hire a bunch more teachers and have them have very small classes with the lower percentage students, and move them up greatly in a short time, instead of having whatever the Department of Education is wasting their money on and all the idiotic things that they come up with. So I am for it. Let them shut it down, but take that Pell Grant part and keep that going somewhere else. I know some people will think, oh, the food, the food, the school lunch. That doesn’t come from the Department of Education, that comes from the Department of Commerce. So that would not be affected in any way, shape or form. So really, to me, I’d be for it. Look, they’re going to attack a lot of departments. For how many years have we heard people, presidents and politicians, say, we’re going to cut the budget, we’re going to cut the deficit, we’re going to cut the debt. The debt, it’s okay for countries to carry debt. We’ve always carried some debt. The trouble is, the amount of it is skyrocketing. The actual debt that the country owes from one year to the next, the last time that ever went down was in 1957. Now the last time we had a budget surplus, was in in 2000. However, the national debt didn’t go down, because the cost of the debt is so outrageous that the debt still went up. The national debt went up only a little bit that year. But it’s jumping now by leaps and bounds. We hear everybody talking about, we got to do something, we got to do something, but every year it just goes up and up and up. Maybe this time it might help. I don’t know, but you look at it in your personal life, whenever you find that you got caught up in debts and it’s overwhelming and you have to fix it, it’s painful and there’s no difference with nations. So if you turn around and say, well, no, we’re going to be all right, forget about it. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. We’ve got to keep funding that, keep funding that. Well, then it’s just going to go and one day it’s going to hit the point, and the disaster that could happen to this country would be worse than the depression. It should be bipartisan. Everybody should get together and do it, but it’s going to be painful, and somebody’s going to say, not me, not me. Well, it’s got to be, everybody’s got to do their part. There’s another scary thing that I look at, a quarter of our debt is held by foreign countries. China is the second biggest. Actually, Japan holds more of our debt than any other country, but Japan is an ally. China is not. China owns almost a trillion of our debt. If they dumped it, if they decided tomorrow they’re going to dump that debt out on the market, they could cause havoc in the United States. So put all that together, they could do a cyber attack on a lot of things, dump the debt on the world market. There’s a lot of things that could happen.”
There’s always the state and local departments of education.
Dick said, “That was always in the beginning, the forming of this was that the states would run education, and they do. I mean, the vast majority of our funding comes through the states, but the federal government, they dangle these things in front of the school districts, and they go for it, but there’s consequences to it, and some of the stuff is stuff that different states want to do or don’t want to do, and so it’s really a problem. Again, there’s so much bureaucracy in the federal government. It’s just, it’s amazing that it even gets anything done and of course, deciding to pay off to debt for some people with our taxpayers money, I was not for that.”
For more information on the schools, click here: https://www.keysschools.com/