As an independent bookseller to school teachers, I often enter into staff rooms where they are talking about budget cuts. Most of these cuts deal with reducing staff, which will increase class size and decrease attention and opportunities for the kids.
In these tough financial times, the last thing we need to be doing is sacrificing our children's educational needs. By doing this we limit their chances for future opportunities such as college and a decent job. In our competitive global environment with countries such as India, China, and the European Union Countries, we need to be INCREASING funding for education, NOT finding ways to cut back on the number of teachers in our schools. We need to be emphasizing and encouraging teacher training and incentives to keep good teachers. NOT cutting staff and the salaries of those that remain, which force them to try to seek employment outside of their chosen field just to survive.
So what made me decide to start this group? While I was out picking up orders for books today in two of the schools they were talking about how they the districts they were in were cutting funding for computers, and also ways of cutting the teachers salaries by about 2000 dollars A YEAR! Teachers don't make tons of money to begin with.
I look at any cuts in educational funding as shooting ourselves into the proverbial foot. If our kids have less of an education than we did because of these cutbacks, than America will be less competitive in the future and will not be able to maintain it's position in the Global community.
