At its July 23 meeting, the Chicago Board of Education, under the control of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, approved its budget for fiscal year 2015, the Chicago Tribune reports, a budget that increases the amount of money spent on the office of the press secretary while decreasing the amount spent on neighborhood schools.
Total expenditures are expected to be around $5.8 billion for the nation’s third-largest school district.
Despite a loss of funding of $72 million for traditional neighborhood schools, the amount of money to be spent on privately run charter and contract schools increased by that amount. Neighborhood schools suffered declines in enrollment, while charter schools gained seats last year, Chicago Public Schools said.
“All schools should have investments but money should definitely follow the child,” the Tribune quoted Illinois Network of Charter Schools President Andrew Broy as saying. “I’ve never quite understood the counter argument; perhaps it might be that district schools or any schools that lose its students should retain funding for students they no longer educate.”
Why we need more press secretaries
The most likely reason for hiring press secretaries is to write press releases to send to news outlets, telling them how the school board and mayor would like certain stories reported. For example, a new line item for a chief press secretary calls for a salary expenditure of $165,000 a year—all of which comes out of our taxes.
For example, if press secretaries do their job properly, they’ll never allow the Tribune to print a statement like “I’ve never understood the counter-argument” without providing the counter-argument.
In fact, the Tribune itself should have found out what the counter-argument was and printed it for the record. See, the more press secretaries an agency hires to write press releases, the more actual press organizations and reporters are relieved of doing any responsible or thorough reporting.
The counter-argument is not, as Mr Broy claims, that district schools that lose students should retain funding for students they don’t educate. That’s not even a contender for the counter-argument, and the Tribune has turned a news story into an editorial, serving an agency that hires press secretaries.
A possible counter-argument here is something like this: The public should invest public money in all public schools, run under the control and oversight of a body responsible to the public, not one that is responsible only to a corporation that closes its books to public inspection.
Or to an agency that hires press secretaries to hide the truth from the public. Or that hires security guards who forcibly remove parents and other dissenting voices from public board meetings.
Three Board of Education security staffers forcibly removed a man from the meeting after he told them to stop harassing his wife. The two attended the meeting, where the wife had signed up to speak about the proposed budget. When board member Jesse Ruiz started to leave, as criticisms of board members’ hypocrisy grew, she called him a coward. Several security men swarmed around her and her family, George N Schmidt for Substance News.net (photo) reported.
