It’s not so much that Philadelphia’s schools are bankrupt, but that our politicians are are morally impoverished.
The number couldn’t possibly be right, Marc Gosselin thought: $160.
That was the total discretionary budget he was handed as the brand-new principal of Anna Lane Lingelbach Elementary, a public school in Germantown.
That’s all he’d have to pay for a whole year’s books, supplies, staff training, after-school activities, and incidentals — small but important items like postage and pizza parties.
“You can’t even buy groceries for $160, let alone run a school for 400 kids for a year,” Gosselin said.
Read the whole thing. Read about the kids with no reading specialists, the clogged toilets, and the poison ivy climbing in the windows. Read about how there’s no playground equipment or arts programming, but plenty of mice.
And read about the unelected, unaccountable School Reform Commission unilaterally -and probably illegally- canceling the contract with the Teachers Union, and then using that “savings” as a quick cash infusion for places like this. An infusion, I might add, that is in question as the Commission’s radical move has been halted by the courts pending a lawsuit.
It’s enough to make a man hang his head and weep. What a monstrous nation we have become. What horrible savages we are, throwing our own children into the garbage can.
