School system a failure

Spokane schools proclaim excellence comparing their scholastic records to national results; that’s like comparing famine to absolute pestilence. In truth we are funding a failed, over-bloated, overpaid, union-bossed bureaucracy with a rubber-stamp school board, all out of control.

Failed? When you have 61.1 percent of 10th-graders failing math, 52.7 percent failing in science, an on-time graduation rate of 62.1 percent and 90 percent of those going on to SCC and SFCC require remedial math.

Over-bloated? Students per classroom teacher: 22; students per employee: nine; out of the 3,087 full-time employees, only 1,283 are classroom teachers, far less than the state average.

Overpaid? The superintendent makes $218,764, more than our governor and $12,000 less than the American vice president. One hundred and ten administrators with benefits average $131,333 per year and teachers for 180 days work with three full days off and 10 early release days make an average with benefits $81,353. This cost for producing failure? The entire curriculum festers failure.

The rubber-stamp board for allowing such a disaster to continue should all resign. We need an independent evaluation and an audit of the entire system. Get rid of tenure and the union and let the taxpayer design the curriculum.

Bert A. Overland

Spokane