Newburyport, Losing Funding for Education
September 10th, 2008As many of the readers of the Newburyport Blog know, I am a big fan of Bill Moyers.
On September 5, 2008 Bill Moyers had this to say at the beginning of the segment on the Bill Moyers Journal:
“Fifty million American children went back to school this week. But as reporter Sam Dillon writes in the “New York Times”, more of them than ever are homeless and poor enough to need free meals. Mortgage foreclosures are throwing hundreds of families out of their homes each month. With fuel and food costs rising, with tax revenues falling, school budgets are in retreat. Detroit, for example, has laid off 700 teachers. We’re not talking about just a few isolated places. This is nationwide…
The Bush Administration was announcing an increase in American aid to Georgia by more than 1500 percent… From 64 million dollars this year to one billion dollars next year. A billion dollars. You can only wonder how many American kids a billion dollars could put back on the buses, back in class, and back in the cafeteria line.”
You can read the whole transcript here.
And this is one of the things that concerns me. We as a country have the Bush administration (I trust Bill Moyers) allocating one billion dollars next year to Georgia (the country not the state). One billion dollars that could have gone to the education of the children in the United States of America. Money that we in Newburyport, MA would not see go towards funding for our much under-funded public schools.
Come January, I want a president who would be wise and prudent in spending our tax dollars, who would make sure that, yes, the war on terror is vital, but so is the education of our children. I want a president who understands that. I do not want another four years of a Bush-Cheney administration.