"Commitment without cash is counterfeit,"

"No one has ever said where this money is going to come from. I commend them for trying to come up with a better model, but this is a false promise."

State Senator Jimmy Stewart commenting on the new "evidence based" school funding scheme.

This is the problem with liberals.....or big spenders....liberal or conservative. You can have all the so called, alleged, relative, "good intentions" in the world, but if you don't have the money for the program, it's just vote buying on credit.

The good thing about the state of Ohio is it's balanced budget requirement. The federal government is where the liberals really shine. They can actually print money and invent it out of thin air to fund their schemes. The problem, of course, is the inflation and higher taxes it causes in the future.

Report: Charter schools perform better than some suggest

No wonder the democrats in the Ohio House want to cut their funding, it's a program that actually works.

Dispatch story here

Strickland / Phillips cut more local school funding

Morgan Local getting 2% cut under Strickland / Phillips plan.

Previous post detailing Athens County's cuts.

Ted Strickland and Debbie Phillips both campaigned on fixing school funding. Especially the perceived inequities between poor Appalachian schools and rich suburban schools.

So, the great irony is that their "plan" to "fix" education funding is to cut funding to most poor schools and give more money to rich districts. I thought the dems were supposed to be for the "poor and disadvantaged".

Since Strickland and Phillips ran on "fixing school funding" and this is the best they can do (cut funding for poor schools and increase funding to rich schools (Upper Arlington = 15% increase, which just happens to be where Phillips attended school), I hope they don't try to help us with anything else. We won't be able to stand too much of government style help much longer.

Priceless

The Athens News' Terry Smith has finally come to the realization that having good intentions doesn't qualify one to be Governor.

At least he's honest. Here's today's Athens News and Terry's column.

"After all this, the people of southeast Ohio who had long tolerated schools with minimal financial resources, always seemingly on the verge of insolvency, excitedly awaited the governor’s reform plan. It had been a long trek through the desert, but finally, the promised land was at hand.
Um, well, no. In the district-by-district breakdown released last week by the governor’s office, here’s how Athens County’s school districts fare under the Strickland education plan:

• Alexander Local School District: No increase in money in fiscal year 2010 and a 2 percent reduction in 2011.
• Federal Hocking School District: 0 percent change in 2010 and 2 percent reduction in 2011.
• Nelsonville York City School District: 0 percent change in 2010 and 2 percent reduction in 2011.
• Trimble Local School District: 0 percent change in 2010 and 2 percent reduction in 2011.
• Athens City School District, (the most prosperous school district in the county): 0 percent change in 2010 and 1 percent increase in 2011.

We’re going to hear a lot of statistical hocus-pocus to explain this but there’s no getting around the fact that schools that have always been considered the ones most unfairly treated under the old system won’t get any new money under the new one, and actually will have to absorb 2 percent reductions.

This is an outrage, and Appalachia Ohio’s native son Ted Strickland should be forced to come up with an explanation."

What must hurt Terry even more is the fact that the Athens News endorsed Strickland and one of the main reasons was his promise of "improved support for education."

"Strickland would accomplish some of his goals -- including more early-childhood education, a focus on science and math instruction, a more effective system of public-private college savings accounts, guaranteed tuition rates -- through tinkering with the funding system. He would try to make it fairer and simpler"

"Strickland is a good man with a sincere desire to improve Ohio's sorry state"

One has to wonder now, that since the Athens News endorsed Strickland and he's turned out to be a disappointment, who else did they endorse that has failed them?

How about Debbie Phillips? Here's The Athens News endorsement of her State Representative candidacy.

"Education is Phillips’ strong suit, as the founder and executive director of the Ohio Fair Schools Campaign. She has an intimate working knowledge of the complex ins and outs of Ohio’s ineffective system for funding schools, and can be depended upon to apply that knowledge in Columbus. She will work with the governor, and hopefully a Democratic majority House of Representatives, to finally reform our unfair system for funding schools."

The Athens News was wrong about her also.

Yes, she's only been a State Representative for a short time, however, Strickland's education funding "plan", looks like it came from Debbie Phillips and her Ohio Fair Schools Campaign, which she was the founder and executive director. It looks like Strickland and Phillips were holding hands while putting this plan together. Take a look at the Ohio Fair Schools Campaign website and see how many initiatives have made it into Strickland's proposal. (It looks like the Ohio Fair Schools Campaign website hasn't been updated since last year, which would lead one to believe that it was purely a vehicle in which Debbie Phillips rode to a State Representative seat.)

While many of the districts she represents are getting funding cuts, see list above, the school she attended (Upper Arlington) is getting 15% and 16% increases over the next two years.

Phillips and Strickland are equally responsible for this debacle of a "school funding plan". The dems have been demagoguing this issue for the past 12-15 years. After all this time, this is the best they could come up with?

While Phillips and Strickland are responsible for this mess, it's up to the voters to hold them accountable on election day.

After this track record of endorsements from the Athens News, one would think that voters should vote against those they've endorsed....for the most part. They get 1 or 2 out of 100 right.


And yes, Terry, you are a liberal.

Unbiased headline

Is the Democrat party writing the headlines for stories in the Marietta Times?

"Ohio Democrats want to create jobs" Maybe it's just me, but the first thought that came to mind was the implication that the Republicans don't want to create jobs. What the headline should have said was "Ohio Democrats want to create government jobs".

A couple of thoughts on this story:

1.

"Sen. Jimmy Stewart, R-Athens, said Monday he's willing to look at Democratic proposals, but has some reservations. For example, he favors the veteran bonus plan vetoed by Gov. Ted Strickland, which would have paid for the bonuses out of the state's rainy day fund.
"The bill that we passed used current resources... instead of going deeper in debt," Stewart said."

Contrast this sentiment to Rep. Charlie Wilson's (D) deficit spending and it's a breath of fresh air.


2.

"Stewart said he's not opposed to the idea but believes fixing the state's unconstitutional education system is the priority and he's skeptical of Strickland's plan.
"That would be helpful," Stewart said of the distance learning initiative, "but what would be even more helpful was if the governor's school funding plan wasn't taking money from some of the poorest districts in the state....""

Then you have Strickland and Debbie Phillips telling us they had an "education funding plan" and they were going to fix "school funding". Then when the "plan" is revealed, it actually reduces funding to many schools in Appalachia....some of the poorest in the state. What kind of a fix is that? As Jimmy stated in another story recently that the Strickland / Phillips plan would actually increase the dependence on property taxes in some districts. This is the main reason Strickland and Phillips said we needed to "fix" school funding in the first place. What they've done is actually made our school funding situation worse.

I hope Strickland and Debbie Phillips don't try to fix anything else!