Sedona AZ (November 2, 2013) – The following is a letter to the SedonaEye.com editor urging a no vote as the election deadline approaches:
We are down to the wire on the school override campaign. For votes to count they will have to be hand carried by 7 PM on Tuesday. I along with many others still encourage a VOTE NO on the SD9 override. There are too many inconsistencies with the programs that are being offered and the way the district is managed.
• Property values went down and are creeping back up – all during the past override period. So the property value argument really does not track with override dollars.
• Using the school system to tout attracting population and professionals to the Sedona Market really does not fly when Sedona population growth was flat over the last 10 years, even losing population according to the last census when AZ gained 10% in population.
• The misuse of school assets as described by past teachers who have written into our website whose comments have been posted.
• Parents putting their kids into Charter Schools because they are not happy with the public school system.
• Sedona Performing Arts center mismanaged and losing $50K a year.
• Graduating kids from RRHS who are unprepared for college, average 75% drop out of college.
• The elimination of trade courses, limiting the opportunities for our young people.
• And the list goes on – for details, including reference sources go to www.USALadyLiberty.org.
What a NO vote does is send a WAKE UP call to school management that the public is NOT PLEASED with the current state of affairs, especially with an average of 55% of an INCREASED property tax bill going to education. VOTE NO, and let’s see what changes the district can make, in programs, personal and efficiencies.
If they actually try to make improvements, bring value for the dollars they are allocated instead of just doing basically what Camp Verde is accomplishing with no override, (looking at ALL three schools as comparison which the YES people don’t want you to look at), then come back next year with an override request of 5 or 6% instead of 15%, they might find a lot of NO voters supporting the efforts of a more efficient school district giving more opportunity to the kids.
Mike Schroeder Sedona AZ
Visit http://www.usaladyliberty.org/
What Verde Valley “Vote Yes” Advocates want is to own the best looking horse in the glue factory (the global job market)! A Harvard study found NO RELEVANT CORRELATION BETWEEN INCREASING PER-PUPIL SPENDING AND GAINS IN TEST SCORES. This is why of the 1.66 million high school students in the class of 2013 who took the SAT, only 43 percent were academically prepared for college-level work, according to this year’s SAT Report on College & Career Readiness. For the fifth year in a row, fewer than half of SAT-participants received scores that qualified them as “college-ready.”
In 2009, the U.S. spent more than $10,000 per student, ranging from $6,356 in Utah to $18,126 in New York. Utah graduates a higher percentage of its students than does New York.
Yet, school funding is the number one reason given by government officials and U.S. Education Dept advocates to support the need to impose a property tax on American citizens. I am not against spending more money on education, I’m just against spending any more money for a failed system of education that will never work! Vote NO and actually help our kids by channeling them into a new and different free-agency (for teachers) system that will teach our kids valuable global job and scientific skills.
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