However, it sure is an EDUCATION, isn't it, kiddos?
"Emotions high over school closings; Students, parents protest proposal" by James Vaznis, Globe Staff | October 16, 2008
Protesting a plan to close their Hyde Park school, students from Elihu Greenwood Elementary School held handwritten and photocopied signs that read "Save Our School" during last night's School Committee meeting, which drew hundreds of students, parents, and staff from across the city.
For more than an hour and a half, students and adults spoke out against Superintendent Carol R. Johnson's ambitious plan to reorganize city schools. The proposal calls for closing about a dozen schools, leaving five buildings empty, while other buildings would be used to expand popular schools or house new ones.
"My school is a second home," said Henrique Fernandes Silva, a student at the Academy of Public Service, one of two small high schools at the Dorchester Education Complex that would close so another school can expand. "You're not changing our school. You are changing our lives."
And everyone knows how helpful chaos is to a kid.
Students from the academy, along with those from Noonan Business Academy, the other Dorchester high school Johnson plans to close, shared personal stories of how their schools transformed their lives, inspiring them to go to college.
Two female students from Noonan cried during their testimony, prompting 16-year-old Dilma Lobo to say, "We are a family that sticks together."
The plan aims to reduce operating expenses by $13.8 million over five years to comply with a City Hall edict to cut millions of dollars in spending. --more--"Of course, "flushing . . . millions of dollars away supporting a highly profitable industry" when it comes to $300 million in taxpayer dollars for Hollywood is o.k., even as the price of a school lunch rises; paying $13 million for a computer software system that could have cost less than $3 million is all right because the winner was a close friend of the House speaker, even as my poorer-than-dirt district "has been struggling to close a $2 million budget gap."; the lottery shelling out "millions of dollars" for sports tickets for "lottery officials, their family members, and friends" is fine, even as schools are closing; making interest payments to banks to the tune of "a staggering $22 billion" for the Big Pit, as we call it around here, is required, even as bridges are neglected across the state; and again, paying off banks like UBS, who can "demand repayment of an additional $2 million a month beginning in January" while also receiving a "$179 million payment," while the state pension fund loses $1 billion dollars -- which still didn't stop the executive director from carving himself a nice "$64,000 bonus on top of his $322,000 annual salary."
Oh, and did I not mention the $1 BILLION dollar giveaway to the pharmaceutical corporations, even though "it's never been easy to turn a profit in biotech?" Flush that money away, too, taxpayer. Of course, the war looters were next in line for a handout. And should the state be appropriating money for a "multimillion-dollar reconstruction" of golf courses?
Nor is it RECKLESS to BORROW the STATE INTO OBLIVION so they can PAY INTEREST to BANKS while SITTING ON $2 BILLION DOLLARS!
Need one final insult, Mass. taxpayers?
See: Massachusetts Gives More Money to Hollywood
Yup, but they are going to CUT JOBS and SERVICES while telling us we need to keep the income tax!!
Don't you just get SICK of the BULLSHIT?!!!!
