Huntsville City Schools Superintendent Ann Roy Moore is hell bent on raising our taxes.

From AL.com:

Huntsville school leaders Tuesday affirmed their support for a property tax hike for new schools and renovations instead of a June sales tax increase they said would not be approved by voters.

The position by Superintendent Ann Roy Moore remains unchanged since October, when she and the superintendents of Madison County’s two other school systems urged the county commission to remove a proposed half-cent sales tax increase from the February ballot. The commission bumped the referendum to June.

Moore said a failed sales tax referendum might hurt future chances of raising taxes, so she expressed support for an increase in property taxes.

I’ll give her credit for having incredible perseverance.  She is right that the sales tax measure will fail miserably, but I’m not sure that a property tax increase will find any more success.  Dr. Moore still has to convince Huntsville residents that our schools, which are currently at 61% capacity, need any additional funds.

As usual Jeanne Robinson is the sole voice of reason on the school board.  She said that, “Anybody who looks at our school system knows we have to consolidate.”  No kidding!

Unfortunately Dr. Moore’s consolidation efforts have been limited to closing two schools and replacing them with a new one.  There are other ideas, though:

To further save money, Moore and schools’ Finance Director Herbert Wheeler said the system will consider not replacing teachers who leave the school system and shuffling teachers around schools based on need.

Wow, what brainiac came up with those ideas.  It should be their standard operating procedure to adjust their labor resources to meet their needs, not some extreme measure taken only when they want to shake down the public for more money.  And not replacing unnecessary teachers - whoa, lets not get crazy.  This is the kind of foolishness you have to deal with when you’re talking about a government run, union dominated monopoly.  If the schools had to compete for students I guarantee you that they wouldn’t wait until they thought they were in a financial crunch to exercise wise hiring and staff allocation practices.

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This entry was posted by Brian on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Education, Huntsville, Taxes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Please note the copyright policy.