Schools plan would fire 1,400 (St Louis public schools)

[Ediacara]

Schools plan would fire 1,400
By Jake Wagman © 2003 St. Louis Post-Dispatch
updated: 08/03/2003 12:39 AM

More than 1,400 employees of the St. Louis Public Schools would be laid off in a budget plan that will be presented this week by the district's new management team.

The budget provides a new blueprint for an organization that has been criticized as costly, inefficient and bloated with bureaucracy. If approved, the plan would cut dozens of administrators, hundreds of clerks and teacher aides and eliminate entire departments in favor of private vendors.

Under the plan, the district's full-time work force would decrease to 4,797 from 6,260. No current classroom teacher would be let go, and the district is looking to fill 242 teaching positions. About 330 teaching spots will remain vacant.

More at the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch

[DemBones DemBones]

1. No doubt they can cut dozens of administrators without anyone

noticing ("Administratium -- the densest element known"), but hundreds of clerks will be sorely missed. Even dozens of clerks would be missed.

[pfitz59]

2. Student clerks

At my kids school they use child labor. Some kids have a class called "Office help" or some such thing. All they do is answer phones and file. Skirting child labor laws.

[TahitiNut]

3. Myth of privatization

"eliminate entire departments in favor of private vendors"?

Like the eternal search for a "perpetual motion machine" the drain-bamaged move to replace public sector (non-profit) labor with private (for profit) labor under the specious guise of expense reduction is complete nonsense. By shifting the accounting for such costs from a continuing labor expense to a purchasing expense, such services then increase pressures to reduce supplies, materials, and all kinds of purchased materials. (Is anyone not aware of how teachers have increasingly had to purchase teaching materials and supplies out of their own pockets or do without???) This is guaranteed to increase the cost-effectiveness ratio (reduced "bang for the buck") which, in turn, leads to hues and crys about the increased costs of declining public education quality.

Private enterprises are not in possession of some "holy secret" of efficiency; they merely syphon off public funds for private profit. It's a con-game.