Federal Bureaucracy: 22,500,000 employees (more than manuracturing, farming, fishing, forestry, mining & utilities – combined)  7.2% of the entire US workforce.

School Bureaucracy: Rockwall Independent School District has a non-teaching to teaching staff ratio of about 1:1. In fact, RISD teachers constitute only 48.8% of all staff – fewer than half of all employees are teachers. (Source: Red Apple Project)

Proportionally, RISD has a much larger bureaucracy than the federal government.

Schools exist for what purpose? Education, you say. Well, then who are the most important people in the school? Obviously, the children, you reply, and right you are.

Now my next question: who are the second most important people in the school? School Board of Trustees? Administrators? No: teachers are the second most important people in our public schools – any schools, for that matter.

If students are primary importance and teachers are secondary, why do we pay teachers least, on average? (Source: Red Apple Project)

I believe school administrators have become a self-sustaining “machine” represented by well-funded lobbyists across the nation, nationally, the American Association of School Administrators (AASA); here in the Lone Star State, the Texas Association of School Administrators (TASA). TASA headquarters is walking distance from our state capitol.

Budget cuts are inevitable as our economy declines. Make no mistake about it: the decline will continue. Property values will continue to diminish as real wages also fade away. One solid indicator of the state of our general economy is the largest retail establishment in the world: Wal-Mart. A recent CNNMoney.com article titled Wal-Mart: Our Shoppers are ‘running out of money’ tells the story bureaucrats don’t want to hear.

Is it common sense to lay off teachers instead of reducing administrative staff? Is it not time to demand we protect our children from being crushed by the bureaucracy of school administration?

What can you do to protect the interests of your children? Contact individual Rockwall School Board Members directly. It will do no good to contact RISD staff. You’ll just get a ‘spin’ from a very nice and respectable lady whose sole purpose is “communications”. Click on this link to learn who your trustees are and the when-and-where of School Board meetings.

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