Are you sick of highly-paid teachers?

[avebury]

36. My problem with education spending in Oklahoma is the fact

that existing education dollars is not being used wisely to begin with. Okahoma needs to work on consolidating school systems to reduce Administrative and utility costs. There are around 537 School Districts of which around 60% or more are in communities with populations less then 3,000. I recently did some research on it in order to do a reply to a local new article on the push for a penny increase in the sales tax. I am at home and don't have the link to the website I used readily available.

The State of OKlahoma could hand over every penny of state revenue to Education and they would still not be happy. There is no amount of money that will ever make them happy. The reality of life is that a state only has X amount of money to cover what needs to me covered. Every entity has to learn to manage their budget wisely. Consolidating school districts would make more funds available for the classroom.

State pension funds is a sore subject here as well. It is a fact that the teachers are draining their fund at a faster rate then the rate that state employees draw on their retirement fund. Every year or so the state legislature will talk about combining the two finds and, as you can imagine, the reaction of state employees is HELL NO! We don't want the teachers anywhere near our retirement fund. I think what has prevented it from happening so far is the fact that the State Legislators' retirement is part of our retirement fund. Combining the funds would hurt their retirement as much as ours.