Carlsbad School District Budgets.

McKenzie Fink
North County Times
"CARLSBAD: School Officials Update Budget"
http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/carlsbad/carlsbad-school-officials-update-budget/article_09b2b09b-04d6-5760-9ec8-79b08a8f41fc.html
The new budget for Carlsbad School District

This article is about the new budget that has been decided by the Carlsbad Unified School District. They have come up with a different budget than originally planned in June. So, now the school have a budget of $83 million, $1 million less than last year but the same budget as the 09-2010 school year. Sadly, although that seems like a lot of money, the budget is not actually that large for the bulk of the budget, $51 million, goes towards salaries and another $18 million goes to employee benefits. That only leaves about $14 million for school supplies, activities, etc.

This connects to what we are studying in class because we learned that very few children were able to go to school. However, in the New England Colonies, towns of 50 families or more had to, by law, hire an instructor for their children. Towns of 100 families or more were forced to build a school. Also, parents were asked to support the school with supplies like money, vegetables, firewood, or anything else it needed. A lot of the time land was set aside as "school-meadows" or "school-fields" which were rented out to raise money for teacher salaries. As you can see, schools back then were not given budgets, they had to get everything by donation and/or the money they had.

This connects to my life because I attend a school in the Carlsbad School District which means that I am being indirectly affected by the budget cut. Schools and everyone involved with them are affected by the smaller budgets, even though they are giving the schools a little more than they had originally planned in June, in many ways. Schools are losing money, not to mention teachers, because they don't have enough money to be able to support the activities, supplies, and decent teacher salaries (which they don't pay anymore) the way the schools used to be able to.

My opinion is that the government officials that are cutting off the schools funds because they are just greedy is absolutely ridiculous. The money spent on JUST the government campaigns could probably feed all of the hungry people in the world! So, they should be able to spare a few million dollars for the schools! Our government is so self-centered they don't care enough about giving children the proper education for they are not providing schools with enough funding. If schools could just make a deal with the government to make sure the president sets aside a larger portion of money for the schools each year I think a lot of problems would be solved.