$160 Million CCS Budget for 2017-2018 Based on “Wishes and Hopes” !!! –20 Teacher Positions to be CUT–Commissioners Cut School Funding for Teachers and Classroom Supplies by $970,000 Report and evaluation by Robert A. Williams

The Cleveland County School Board plans on spending $160,281,352.00 in the 2017-2018 school year, up about $5 million from just two or three years ago. One could ask how can this huge amount of money be spent and the results are so poor? This is a school board election year, so ask the incumbent candidates that question and be ready for a whole lot of lies. This article is about money, where it comes from, where it goes and why is so much wasted at CCS.

The attached video segment from the March 13, 2017 CCS Board meeting where the 2017-2018 budget is being discussed tells the tale. The CCS budget is reverse engineered. CCS comes up with what they want to spend and then tries to get enough funding from the feds, the state, the County Commissioners and whoever they can con to give them some money. CCS is a typical bureaucracy. Spend all the money in their dummied up budget and ask for more next year.

So, some highlights from the phony CCS budget:

Nothing was stated about how CCS will be paying for the new North Shelby School project. Even though there are plenty of empty capacities at relatively new schools already built, CCS has to spend another $16 million for a new North Shelby School. Shelby Middle School was built for 800+ students and only 400 attend. There are presently 82 students at North Shelby School. There was plenty of room at Shelby Middle School or the Central Offices to absorb the students from North Shelby with plenty of room left over. $16 million wasted to build another school for no other reason than for Bully Glover, Kathy Falls and Donnie Thurman, Jr. to use this as a re-election scam on the low information voters in Cleveland County. Informed voters should recognize that it is in the best interest for all students and citizens to spend this wasted money for better purposes.

20 teaching positions will be cut because of decreasing student attendance. CCS Superintendent Stephan Fisher says there will be no actual cuts because the teaching positions will be eliminated by attrition. That is misleading. About 20 teachers per month resign from CCS, so all they have to do is hire 20 less teachers to fill all the vacancies. They never think to try to find out why the turnover is so high. Danny Blanton has asked about this many times but Blanton is told that such high turnover is normal. No other Board member seems to care. There was a discussion about Charter Schools taking students from CCS that lowered the number of students at CCS. At 20 students per classroom teacher, 400 or more students leaving CCS apparently has caused CCS to cut the 20 teaching positions. No information regarding any cut in CCS staff positions was mentioned. This is how it always happens. Teaching positions are the first thing that is cut at school systems. Imagine if Charter Schools would take ALL CCS students. That would result in a still bloated CCS bureaucracy with no purpose to exist except to spend tax dollars. If such a thing happened, I suspect the CCS Board under Bully Glover would just continue as is wanting to spend every dime in the budget with zero results in educating children. Of course the children would benefit by going to Charter Schools like the Pinnacle Classical academy, which has run circles around CCS in every category. Except wasting money. Pinnacle Classical Academy has spent every dime they receive very wisely and have produced extraordinary results. Bully and his cronies never ask what has Pinnacle done that CCS should be doing.
Funding from the County Commissioners was cut $870,000 from teacher salaries and over $100,000 for classroom supplies. $970,000 less from the County Commissioners while the nit-wit commissioners give away $ $36 million to Clearwater Paper for an expansion that will add 180 jobs, yet cut about a million dollars from our schools. That shows the Commissioners have no concern for the future of our children and have their heads pretty much up their behinds.

More coverage of the March 13, 2017 CCS Board meeting will be provided in another article.