ALMOST HALF OF ALL EDUCATION FUNDING IN SOUTH CAROLINA DOESN’T FOLLOW THE CHILD
FITSNews – January 19, 2007 – According to a new report from the S.C. Policy Council, nearly half the money South Carolina spends on K-12 education – or $1.2 billion dollars – is tied to a labyrinthine, categorical maze which follows literally dozens of different bureaucracies, but not the individual school children it’s supposed to be helping.
The recommended answer to getting more dollars to the classroom? It’s called Weighted Student Funding (WSF), which essentially involves breaking down the barriers between the dollars taxpayers dump into the education treasury and the dollars that actually end up making a difference in educating a child.
The new report, entitled “Funding The Child,” found that forty-five percent of South Carolina’s current education funding is defined as “categorical” rather than “per pupil.” That’s the fifth-highest percentage of categorical funding in the entire nation, and yet another sign that South Carolina is feeding a much larger education bureaucracy than it needs to be.
The report also discovered that South Carolina presently has 74 different revenue codes, each with separate “formulas for allocation, criteria and prescriptions for use.”
And even though the report didn’t uncover this specifically, our bet is that each revenue code also has its very own bureaucrat (or two) sitting over at the State Department of Education building, trying to look busy most days of the year. And all those bureaucrats probably have their own assistants, ladies named Ethel or Maude who probably just sit there all day long filing their nails, checking their hair and smacking away at some Eclipse gum while they read the latest celebrity gossip here on FITSNews.
And we bet they probably giggle and get all nervous whenever Jim Rex walks by and asks them for their TPS reports, too. Because he’s sexy. And powerful. And he loves the children. And gets great ink in La Socialista. And he wants all of them to keep their jobs even if they don’t do anything, or if what they do doesn’t really need doing.
Seriously, these jokers may be pocketing one out of every two dollars that gets spent on education in this state before it gets to our classrooms, but damn if they don’t love the children!
And after all that is what it is all about. Loving the children. It is all about loving the children. Word.
