The following remarks were written by Tea Party leader Tom Austin (Onslow County Tea Party) to deliver to the Onslow County Board of Education. Unfortunately, the Board stopped him after 3 minutes and he was not permitted to finish -- My thanks to the Onslow County School Board for this opportunity to speak. What I have to talk about has to do with the budget for the Onslow County School system and the affect Common Core will have on it. According to the state of North Carolina, the cost for the Common Core Standards is an increase of $389 per student. I am not sure if that is correct. There are Professional Development courses that are required to train the teachers on the new Common Core academic standards and methods. This Professional Teacher Development will cost $1,931 per teacher. There are 1,565 teachers. That is a cost of $3,022,015. There are the 26 Instructional Coordinators that are in the system and they will need the training. That cost is $50,206. I don’t know if the teacher’s assistants or the Instructional Aids will need the training, but there are 527 of them. That would be a cost of $1,017,637. This runs to a total of $4,089,858. This is with a student to teacher ratio of 15 to 1. The records show the current student testing cost is about $10 per student. The student testing under Common Core will go to $28 or $29 per student. That is an increase of $18 or $19 per test per student. The test questions will be made public after the test so each year new questions and tests will need to be developed so the cost will just go up. These tests are purchased from an outside source. According to the county records there are 24,046 students. With the increase in student testing charges of $18 or $19 per student per test that means the increase in testing cost will be $456,874. I could not find any information on the cost of new text books that would be needed, so I am going to project a cost of $30 per book and I think that will be low. This would be approximately $750,000 or in other terms, three quarters of a million dollars. So far that comes to a total increase in spending of $5,296,732. Some of this will be one-time expenditures, but much will be reoccurring cost that will do nothing but climb over the years until the county and state can no longer carry the load and we have to turn our entire educational system over to the Federal Government. This increase in cost does not include the cost of upgrades and improvements to local infrastructure. Common Core testing in North Carolina will have to be taken on computers. The state and local education authorities will have to examine concerns about bandwidths and technology. Are there enough computers? Are the schools wired for the extra power requirements? If they are going to be hardwired, are the schools wired for this with Cat-6 wiring? Or are all the computers going to be on Wi-Fi with a central server in each school or will each school need several servers? How about the additional bandwidth needed to connect each school with the central offices of the school system? How often will the school system need to upgrade the computers in the classrooms? Who pays for that? I am guessing that will be the local county taxpayer. There are many more questions to be asked and each question shows an increase in the cost of this “social progressive” system. ---------------------------------------------------------------- What I had not planned to bring up was the $75 million bond request they have upcoming this year nor the approximant $86 million that stills remains on the last bond they had. I was also not going to bring up that in a conversation with an administrative staff member at one of the informational meetings they admitted that were going to request another bond in just 2 years. With the proposed 2013 – 2014 budget having the education department taking up over 31% of the county funds, I have to ask: Just how much does the School Board want? I have not had a raise in 4 years. How am I supposed to pay these additional taxes? Yes, I want the children to be well educated, but Common Core will not get that job done. Looking at the overall school budget and financial requests the $5 million plus that Common Core will cost in its first year may seem a small thing, but we need to stop spending money in some places now. Common Core is not only costly, as well as not needed, it is a bad thing for the students. Respectfully, Thomas H. Austin Citizen of Onslow County
Posted on: Mon, 07 Oct 2013 02:49:07 +0000
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