Pure Magic Hurricane Katrina shut down 489 Louisiana schools, stranding 247,000 public and private school students. More than 125,000 children were ousted from Many states’ school systems pitched in to offer a helping hand without questioning the cost. Florida, with its governor as the President’s brother, followed suit. At the end of September, 2005, over 5,000 children had already been enrolled in Florida public schools. This not only put an additional burden on schools’ allotted – and usual "limited" – finances, but also mandated a plethora of waivers such as potential exemptions from the state’s mandated FCAT, required immunizations (disregarding the fact the many of these children had been stranded for days in polluted, toxic-infected waters); family qualifications for free lunches and pre-school activities, and most of all, Florida’s Reduced Class Size Amendment, which the governor himself attempted to repeal because of its “unrealized taxpayers’ cost.” Since Florida’s school system was, as usual, in dire need of certified teachers, especially those in the FCAT mandated core-subject areas, Florida’s governor and his Department of Education welcomed with open arms any certified-evacuee teacher, requiring again by the DOE, total exemptions from Florida’s own certification requirements and all its bureaucratic, mandated fees. |
As a knight in shining armor, along gallops our President again with his entourage of Robin Hood jolly men. His recent voucher bill proposes to reimburse all schools, whether public or private, that absorb into their student bodies, Katrina’s evacuees. The goal is to “allow these families, especially the children to return to some kind of normalcy and to allow them to continue their education.” Praiseworthy? Absolutely, but at whose cost? Simple answer: the taxpayer. Education S For decades, the southern states’ DOE’s, especially Florida, because of its highly-populated citizenry on limited WJK-10/05 |
Mississippi’s 226 schools. The tale of woe is infinite and the attempted rapid resettlement of such innocent victims has no precedent in U.S. history. 
ecretary, Margaret Spellings, is seeking an additional $2.6 billion from Congress to pay 90 percent of what each state pays to educate an evacuee student. “The President believes,” she said, “as do I, that we should not penalize those families because they chose to select private schools.”
retirement incomes, have bemoaned the fact of “No money” for schools, administrators, teachers, teacher-aides, and the schools’ support personnel. But the financial rabbit again is being pulled out of the hat, a rabbit that, with glee, is sporting thousands of unexplained taxpayers’ dollars -- to be handed out to and fro without question. Pure magic.