budget cut suggestion

The children's librarian was telling me yesterday that the county is slashing funding so much that she might not have a job much longer. I said that it was unfair that the politicians threaten the only services that the public really needs such as fire stations and libraries when they have so many unnecessary bureaucratic positions that could be eliminated. The public schools for example are full of paper pushers whose jobs description must include trying to make things more difficult for homeschoolers like this superintendent from Rhode Island who insisted on an

... illogical requirement that homeschoolers “go through the Central Office Complex for registration and follow the guidelines of policy JFAA for the Admission of Resident Students.” The school superintendent felt so strongly that homeschoolers should have to register in exactly the same way as public school students that he refused to budge. Instead, he appealed to the Rhode Island Department of Education.

On February 1, the Commissioner of Education sent a letter to the superintendent stating:

“It is my opinion that personal information related to the home schooled student and his/her parents is not subject to the same data collection protocols that apply to students enrolled in public school. … [T]he parents of homeschooled children are not required to provide you with the same ‘basic information’.” HSLDA

Private schools just do not have the quantity of administrative positions that the public schools do, why pay for four principals in a middle school when one will do? The same situation occurs in medicine, a county hospital will have a small building for the administration while the staff that does not come in contact with patients at Portsmouth Naval Hospital commandeers the entire original hospital for offices and conference rooms. When budgets are fixed, the private entity will reduce overhead while the government entity will cut basic positions that are supposedly the purpose of the enterprise such as teachers or nurses.