I remember my days working on a small charter fishing boat down in Key West, Florida. More often than not we came in with a full hold of fish and happy customers (not in the hold too of course), and on these occasions we, the crew, could pick up a few extra bucks cleaning the catch of the day.

The process of cleaning, or gutting, is simple enough: slice along the bottom to open the fish up, remove all the innards, cut off the head and fillet the meat off the bones. This would leave you with … well … a bunch of dead fish.

Once again our state government has proven that our (for now) local public schools are nothing more than fish in the sea to be caught and gutted. What’s left is going to be temporarily nourishing at best.

The newest assault on our public education system comes in the way of “targeted reductions”. (Education chief sets budget targets for school districts, Barre/Montpelier Times Argus, 08/05/10) This is nothing more than a tactic designed to impress upon us all the state government’s supremacy, a desire to crush the hard earned wages of dedicated educators and kill off extremely important educational programs that our young folks depend on so much to prepare them for the future … oh, and it’s also designed to remove that local part of our (for now) local school systems by making it impossible for local communities to make rational, local decisions.

(Personally I’m not against reducing the cost of public education, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt this can be done while IMPROVING both educational offerings and outcomes. But the reality is that the command and control freaks in Montpelier don’t want to do the one thing that would really allow this to happen: give up centralized control. ‘Nother discussion, ‘nother day.)

Williamstown recently experienced a community budget process that went through a series of 3 votes with the outcome being a “level funded” budget. I used quotes in the previous sentence because “level funded” really meant a $200,000 cut in educational expenditures for the majority of our (for now) local school district’s youth.

You see we’re budgeting for a little more than $200,000 increase in special education costs over the previous fiscal year. Yet I don’t hear a pip out of the legislature or governor’s office or Vermont’s ed department about the need to find relief for those costs we have literally no control over.

Quite the opposite: There’s a proposal floating around the state house to mandate our (for now) local schools come up with a policy and plan to reach %100 graduation rates. On top of that at least one Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Ms. Markowitz, is actively pushing a plan to turn our (for now) local school systems into prisons for those who have passed their 16th birthday and don’t want to be in school right now.

Nope … no help in spending less to be found there.

This whole process is a well oiled and intentional effort to gut everything out of our (for now) local school districts with the desired end result being a hollowed out, lifeless institution that in the end will do nothing more than churn out well behaved workers for major corporations … just pay attention to the rhetoric and policies coming out of our state government.

So gut the schools, get back at the teacher’s union and screw the kids … ’cause we got targeted cuts to make.

Vermont’s executive and legislative branches are out to gut public education!