Why I disagree with CUEE

As anyone from Valdosta and Lowndes County already knows, the CUEE is an organization started by the local Chamber of Commerce and various interested parties to get a referendum on the November 8, 2011 ballot to consolidate the city and county school systems. They claim that, by combining the school systems, that the new school system will produce smarter students more prepared "to compete on a global level to achieve success". Basically what they are looking for is a smarter student for their minimum wage jobs. They don't have any specific details on exactly how to produce smarter students. Their plan is to force everyone together to come up with a better plan than what there is now. There are numerous reasons why this stinks like dead fish.

First, the underlying motive is as I said. The CUEE isn't necessarily looking to increase test scores and graduation rates. They want a more highly educated worker bee. They say they want to be able to attract more higher paying jobs to the area. The problem is two-fold. Jobs have come to the area. Unfortunately, most of them are low paying warehouse jobs. These companies relocated to Valdosta because of the ability to pay lower wages. There also is no guarantee that our students would get those jobs. Valdosta is a Metropolitan Statistical Area. That means that the labor pool around here consists of several cities and counties. That gives us less control over the education of our worker bees. Some of the board members of the CUEE don't even have kids in public schools. Several of them are retired and don't work anyway. One even sold his company, subsequently putting his former employees out of work. How's that for loyalty?

Second, what the CUEE is proposing is basically to force the city and county together as one school system. Simply put, the city school system would disappear and be absorbed into the county school system. Now, the city schools are against it. The county schools are against it. The mayor and city council are against it. As a matter of fact, I haven't talked to anyone who is for it. I can't figure out where they got 7,100 signatures on a petition. That's roughly 25% of the registered voters. One would think that 25% of the time, I would bump into a consolidation supporter. But I haven't. Consolidation would not save any money. You can't cut duplicate positions because you are doubling the total number of students. Classes are already at very high per capita levels, thanks to budget cuts. It would take years to sort out the confusion over who was in charge of what. Don't think for a minute that it would be all warm and fuzzy. When HB 489 required the city and county to combine their Parks and Recreation departments, it took a state mandated mediator to force them to come to a consensus! This is way bigger than that. What do you suppose the more than 17,000 students are going to do while the fight rages on? Consolidation will affect them the most, with the confusion over which teaching methods are best and who is in charge. These kids do good to get along at the annual football clash. Not that they're bad. but this rivalry has been around for 45 years. The inevitable desire by some city dwellers to get their kids into predominantly white schools will create a nightmare in paperwork. There is this misconception that that city schools are bad because they are predominantly black. That's not necessarily true. It's just a stigma. An interesting note is that while Lowndes schools have a higher graduation percent, they also have a higher dropout rate. What really pisses me off is that recently the CUEE decided to make it a racial issue. Their claim now is a vote against consolidation is a vote for segregation. That crap stopped in the 1960's. Quit trying to make it a race thing.

I think, if you want to fix the schools, Get rid of No Child Left Behind! NCLB has teachers teaching for CRCT testing and not for the 3 R's. I know that the learning atmosphere is different now but 2 plus 2 still equals 4. Unfortunately, the attention deficit disorder brought on by video games and cartoons has caused teachers to need to come up with alternate methods of teaching to capture that fleeting attention span. Some teachers are successful, some aren't.


By the way, I registered to vote just to be able to vote against consolidation.