Pay to Play Brought to You By the Tea Party

If you have a student-athlete in the Meridian School District, make sure you tell the next Tea Party Patriot you see, "THANK YOU!" Thank you, for forcing my family to pay $100 for my middle or high school student to participate in athletics. You see, thanks to the Tea Party and Austin Hill stridently opposing the recent school bond levy election, the District is being forced to adopt a Pay to Play scheme in order to maintain its school sports.

There is nothing more patriotic then telling the poor kid he can't play middle school football because his mom and/or dad can't afford to fork out the dough. After all, elitism and exclusivity is the American Way! Just think, if you have a family with four students between 6th and 12th grade and each of your students play a sport in the fall and in the spring, you'll be lucky enough to pay $800! That's a bargain compared to the $25 the levy would have cost!

Now, Austin Hill and the Tea Party Patriots, as great as they are, don't deserve all the credit! No way! Our wonderful Anti-Education Legislature definitely should be given a nice slap on the back for a job well done. Instead of taking advantage of numerous alternatives to raise revenue without raising taxes they knew, in their infinite wisdom, that the best solution was pass the buck. So again, THANK YOU!

Alright... I'm done being snarky. Seriously though, pay to play? Yeah, its come to that in Meridian. Its a shame.

Changes in Education

Quick little post... Today my wife, a sixth grade teacher in the Meridian School District, received proof that the grandfathering of continue contracts in the "Students Come First" legislation was pretty much worthless. Due to the failed levy from last month, the school district is going to have to RIF about 100 teachers. In an email to my wife (and likely every other teacher) was informed that all teachers would be given RIF numbers (I guess like draft numbers from the military). The numbers are assigned based upon scores on evaluations the teachers received in their last formal evaluation. In other words, bad eval, low RIF number, good eval, high RIF number. Seems fair enough, but what if the teacher was just having a bad day? Plus, it doesn't sound like any teachers actually knew that evaluations would have that sort of impact. That sort of lack of transparency really calls into question the fairness and efficacy of using that sort of standard. More on this later...