Remarkable how out-of-the-mainstream utilitarian cycling seems to be in my neighborhood. Strong car-centric culture in Southern California, for sure. (yes, I was, until recently, part of that). 🤔
@autumn@ai6yr We'd LOVE to have more kids walking & biking up here, but Seattle & much of Western Washington never bothered with sidewalks beyond a certain point. Many of our roads from schools out to neighborhoods were once old logging roads - windy, hilly, no shoulder, flat out dangerous for kids to walk or bike on. ☹️
Since a large majority of school districts across Washington sent out RIF notices this week, here's how we got to the point:
First came the McCleary lawsuit & #waleg arrogantly & carelessly rushed to meet the deadline last minute without seeking any feedback from stakeholders. They fucked up royally, but ignored us when we told them they made things worse.
Among the things they fucked up? Elimination of the staff salary mix, which reimbursed districts for the staff they HAD, replacing it with a flat rate. This penalizes districts with more experienced staff & incentivizes only hiring new, inexperienced (& cheap) teachers. (This definitely had WA GOP fingerprints ALL over it.)
There's also the little issue of the sneaky levy "swipe" which doubled property taxes in King & Snohomish counties & sent local levy money to fund rural school districts by way of the state budget, all engineered by a GOP legislator Chad Magendanz & DINO Ross Hunter.
Neither the state NOR the feds have EVER fully funded IDEA/Special Ed as promised. WA State has had a cap on what it will pay for Special Ed, the rest used to come out of our local levies, which #waleg has now restricted our collection of. The ~$25M deficit my district has this year is DIRECTLY tied to our SPED costs.
What this all means for kids is that fewer of their needs will be met, class sizes will get larger, teachers will be more stressed & under WAY more pressure, parents will get pissed, & the right wingers will increase their drumbeat for "school choice" aka school #vouchers claiming that public schools are failing. And in #waleg, the Democrats are just as much to blame for this as the GOP. None of them have made ANY attempt to rectify what they screwed up.
@ai6yr It's a nightmare. 5 teachers from my school are being laid off, about 67 teachers in my district, plus support staff & admins. We have a teacher shortage yet we're laying teachers off STATEWIDE in this budget cliff for schools here that was predicted back in 2018 right after the legislature unleashed their "fixes".
@ai6yr Also a whole lot of racism lately. A well-known meteorology prof up here in the PNW showed his white supremacist bent & a bunch of his weather acolytes joined him & also ramped up attacks on NWS offices sending alerts out in multiple languages.