Looking marvelous at the funeral
Who's prioritizing Mississippi's budget and placing education at the bottom?

**Updated notes - 'Governor proves me wrong'**

May 22, 2004

Things have gone downhill since Valentine's Day. Here Mississippi sits three months later with huge education funding cuts, and the worst of the cuts going to the poorest districts, the ones least able to absorb it. We're talking about poor delta blacks and poor foothills whites. Carroll County and Coahoma County are particularly hard-hit; I suppose these folks, not having much money, don't have the political clout of other voters. Hey, let's just finish them off, if we can....

$34.000/Day mule kick
Here's the kicker - we're paying approximately $34,000 PER DAY for a special session to do tort reform. Tort reform is what our governor sees as so pressing that he has called an expensive special session to deal with it? And this in the midst of a funding crisis that has him dipping heavily into the rainy day funds of the tobacco settlement and had Republican senators crying for the spending of the rainy-day funds of schools that had been thriftily saved for emergencies?

Governor proves me wrong
Priorities for the people of this state are not getting better, they are going down the toilet with a powerful flushing sound - the only money the Governor seems worried about is that belonging to big corporations and wealthy outsiders coming here for the balmy cheap labor and legal weather promo'ed by our chief weatherman.. Haley Barbour may be from Mississippi, but the time since he was from here before has been too long. The place in life from which he started has been too far removed from the struggles of ordinary Mississippians for him to have understood them in the first place. Long years in the powerful halls of Washington have rubbed away any vestiges of Mississippi from him and left us with a Washington insider running the poorest state in the Union. I thought there was no where for Mississippi to go but up, but Barbour has soundly proved me wrong.

What's that old populist battle cry? Throw the rascals out!

Three and one/half more years - can Mississippi survive them?

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Valentine's Day. Being neither a beautiful young woman expecting to be besieged by boxes of chocolates and dozens of roses, or one of the eager young men vying for such a woman's attentions, I could relax and sit down at my computer to read the news. I started with the Clarion Ledger. My Valentine's day reached utter ironic perfection upon seeing two different articles in the paper that were seemingly unrelated. One was about education, one was about Welcome Centers and rest stops in Mississippi.

The first article, Schools facing grim financial realities, states in the subheading "If budget figures hold, 3,000 teachers could lose jobs, official says." It further states that,

"Schools would receive $162 million less for the year that begins July 1 than they are receiving this year under the recommendations, said Judy Rhodes, director of educational accountability with the state Department of Education.

Districts would not only have to compensate for the reduced funding but also honor a state law mandating an 8 percent teacher pay raise."

Man alive, this article really caught my attention, and made my heart sink. Here we are in Mississippi, almost at the bottom of the list for the quality of our education and now we're sinking even further? (I'm trying to remember if Arkansas or Alabama kept us off dead bottom, but does it really matter?)

To his credit, Governor Barbour was at the meeting where these figures were brought out, and he said,

"I want to be open and honest and say I hope we can get money for K-12. But I did want to look you in the eye and tell you that my priority is to keep community colleges and universities from being cut $100 million,"

He does have chutzpah, I'll grant him that.

Cutting community colleges and universities doesn't seem like a very good option to me either, but there are problems with this particular either/or scenario. Who are the colleges and universities going to be for? Children of the wealthy who went to expensive and well-funded private schools? Out of state folks with more money than Mississippians? Is this our only choices, and who decided those were the only options? It appears that Mississippi's Governor did.

While mulling this over, keep in mind that we are also looking at a hiring freeze for the state and huge cuts in Medicaid, the program that keeps the poor and disabled people in our state from doing without desperately needed medical care and prescriptions. The middle class in Mississippi can barely afford medical care and/or medical insurance, what does the rest of the state (other than the wealthy) do?

Seems that our state is in a more desperate position than ever before. So, the question is, what to do now? Since I couldn't think of any good answers, and this whole thing was just too depressing, I just sighed and clicked the back button to the main page.

Seeking relief in something lighter, I scrolled down to this article Miss. highway rest stops, welcome centers to be revamped. When I clicked through, the subtitle gave me pause: "Estimates average $500,000 per facility to update lighting, security."

Wait a darn minute, what was going on here? I was getting this strange and dizzy feeling, as though something was very out of balance. I'd gotten over my sinus problems, so I knew it wasn't stopped up ears giving me this lightheaded feeling.

Mississippi highway rest stops and welcome centers from the Tennessee line to the coast are in for a makeover to enhance the state's image.

The goal is to provide cleaner restrooms, better security and lighting at the state's nine welcome centers and 11 rest stops.

It's critical to have well-maintained facilities that are clean, adequately lighted and safe, said Northern District Transportation Commissioner Bill Minor.

"If there's no security there, they will tear them up," said the former state senator from Holly Springs. "If there's no guards, women will hate to stop."

Well darn. Critical? I agree that it sounds really important, but critical? Mr. Minor is right, women will hate to stop. But I hate worse to short our kids on K-12 education.

How many of these welcome centers and rest stops do we have in this state? Nine Welcome Centers and 11 rest stops, as it turns out. Hmmmm, I have ten toes and ten fingers, I can do some quick calculations. $500,000 times 20 is what, a cool million? Where is the money coming from to do this? And how many K-12 teachers could we get for a cool million?

I can't argue with the importance of security and improving Mississippi's image, but when faced by hard choices, a person has to have priorities. So do states.

These two articles suggest a couple of analogies to me. One is the house hit by a tornado with a huge leak in the roof and all the landscaping and security lights torn out. The owner has no insurance and can only raise so much money, but not quite enough to cover both items. What are the owner's priorities? A sound roof with no leaks, or security lights and some nice trees and shrubbery?

The other thought is even closer to the reality. It's like finding out that you have a rampaging cancer. What do you do? Do you decide that the radiation and chemo are just too expensive? Do you decide to cut your treatments to what you can afford after you get dolled up and improve your image? Do you go out and get a nose job, a makeover at the beauty shop (less chemo and radiation mean you may not lose your hair), get your nails done, and buy a well-made classic outfit which will last a long time, but is rather expensive? It's not what I'd do.

As foolish as this course of action sounds, this logic is basically the same logic being proposed for Mississippi for it's educational needs and image improvement. Could we have some sensible prioritizing here?

Otherwise, Mississippi is going to look just marvelous in the casket.

     -- C.W. Roberson