'Deficits don't matter' - Ask Elk Grove School students if they do

'Reagan proved deficits don't matter," Dick Cheney told Paul O'Neill during a Cabinet meeting. "We won the (2002) midterms. This is our due."

This might be true if you are a government that is financing a multi-trillion dollar war, but when you are the Elk Grove Unified School District, the projected $25 million budget shortfall is not as easy to foist on taxpayers.

A few thoughts about the EGUSD budget shortfall.

- Are you curious why ninth grade math teachers are being targeted for pink slips at a time when nationally our children are lagging in both science and math compared to other countries. Perhaps some administrators, like the spokesperson, should be pink-slipped instead.

- Just a few short years ago the EGUSD was by some measures the fastest growing school district in the country. Now the school board is projecting a loss of maybe 500 students next school year.

- The school board can look to Sacramento County and the Elk Grove City Council to share the blame for the budget shortfall for approving seemingly every housing project in the last ten years with no thought ever given to managing population growth. Wouldn't it had been nice if instead of making Elk Grove Sacramento's bedroom community we had developed so non-retail jobs out here?

- Wasn't Arnold installed because Davis couldn't manage the state budget?

- The foreclosure crisis in starting to hit local governments. What further cuts in service can we expect?

- From a Washington Post story on the cost of the Iraq occupation: A trillion dollars could have hired 15 million additional public school teachers for a year or provided 43 million students with four-year scholarships to public universities, the book says.

- In today's mail came a postcard to parents of EGUSD students stating that five district high schools and six middle schools will have open enrollment next year. As far as I remember, this has not happened at any time in the last 15 years.

- Open enrollment implies these schools are below capacity. Perhaps the newest school, Cosumnes Oaks, which by some reports will have only a few hundred students should be mothballed until the housing market recovers. Perhaps it could be leased to Los Rios Community College District.

What do you think?