Quote:
Originally Posted by deanp
I'd have to look at our latest budget, but last I looked I think more than 50% of our town budget was school department related. Why not stretch your idea to schools? School buildings in all locations, supervisory staff to maintain behavior in the buildings at 40% the salary of a teacher, and 25% of the current number of teachers teaching classes from a centralized location broadcast over the web to video screens in the schools?
I'll say it again - if my house is on fire, or I am trapped in a crushed car and need the jaws of life to be extricated, I want someone on call ready to roll.
Re: volunteer status - you'd also need to look at the demographics of the community. This may work in small towns where people live where they work - but do they work in bedroom communities where the majority of candidates that would volunteer work 20, 30 or 60 minutes from where they would volunteer?
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I most familiar w/ California, where schools are largely funded by the state budget. Local/city budgets are dominated by public safety. From a Wall Street Journal piece on the Vallejo CA bankruptcy:
Vallejo is a Bay Area community of 121,000 that two years ago became the state's largest city to declare bankruptcy. Like other municipalities, its public-sector unions had driven its budget deep into the red. A report issued by the Cato Institute last September noted that 74% of the city's general budget was eaten up by police and firefighter salaries and overtime along with pension obligations. The average city in the state spends 60% of its budget on those things
Steven Greenhut: Vallejo's Painful Lessons in Municipal Bankruptcy - WSJ.com
(I admit this is only an op-ed piece so I don't consider the factual data as solid as in an actual WSJ story - would need to be checked)