courtesy of us taxpayers.
Blaska is back in kvetch mode today. Madison public schools will do it every time. The district is giving away more free stuff to its employees: 12 weeks — 60 days worth — of taxpayer paid parental leave for every teacher, custodian, lunch lady, and bureaucrat. Price tag: $1.2 million/year.
No other school district in Wisconsin offers this generous bennie — not Milwaukee, Kenosha, Green Bay, or Racine. Do you get 60 days of paid parental leave at your job? University of Wisconsin employees and City of Madison workers get half that. Parental leave for state government employees is unpaid.
Just the same, generous paid leave felt “long overdue” to school board president Savion Castro, research fellow at UW-Madison School of Education and project assistant at its Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives. (Yeah, Madison’s school board is incestuous.)
What rankles is that the Metropolitan Madison School District pleaded poverty just last November to finagle taxpayers to authorize an additional $100 million in school operating revenue into infinity (and beyond) — that, on top of $507 million in one-time school construction money. Combined with city and county taxes, Madison homeowners averaged an 11.2 percent hit on their property tax bills in just one year.
At the same time, MMSD superintendent Joel Gothard is pretty please asking Democrats to reconsider their vote turning down extra money for special education. (“The check is NOT in the mail.”)
You can see the University of Wisconsin campus from MMSD Doyle administration building. UW-Madison is closing a pair of libraries to meet a campus-wide budget cut goal of around 5% to 7%. Tighten belts? Not Madison’s public schools!
For Democrats like Francesca Hong and Kelda Roys, school spending is never enough. Did not stop them from sabotaging their own governor’s bipartisan $600 million school funding bill, which would have brought $25 million to MMSD. Democrats did so on the grounds that the money wasn’t permanent and largely went for tax relief (Yuck!), not the teachers union. Republicans didn’t mandate two months worth of paid parental leave, either. A Democrat(ic) legislature will do so, watch and see.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: The teachers union endorsed this school board — as it has Sen. Roys (D-Madison teachers union) for governor. They’re getting returns on their dollars. Judging by MMSD’s anemic reading test scores — less than half students passed DPI’s Forward test — students and their parents are not.
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