I kept my mouth shut last year when I saw that the Fayette County Board of Education had given a $70,000 job to the wife of the superintendent. Poor guy is just making do with … what … 190,000 bucks a year!
Now the board, with its dirt-rich superintendent, has a new scheme to spend $200,000 of the taxpayers’ money on some Internet-based program that does everything but slice bread.
I’ve lost the name of that wonder of all wonders program which BOE claims will do so many things that the county school system just has to have done.
However, the chances are better than 50-50 this kind of program can be pulled off the web for free, or next to nothing.
I put “educational support services” into Google and got back 36,000 sites to check over. If the board wants to spend money, try $7.95 a month for each of the kids, k-6, for a program called ABCmouse.com, which offers hundreds of unique games, etc., to help educate children in the basics, all on a online tablet, what have you. (I have no connection with ABCmouse.)
Is there nothing out there, where the Fayette BOE could joint-venture or share with other existing programs, at a much lower price tag?
On the higher scale of education, the Wall Street Journal noted a few days ago that Facebook, Google and AT&T are partnering with Udacity to build programs in data science and computer science to train people in skills that will link with jobs.
Moreover, Infosys has joined with a community college in Michigan to build a software engineering boot camp for job seekers.
BOE, try thinking outside the box, on looking for new programs, new systems, to help our students. So far, your thinking has resulted in the recent closing of good, solid schools in my town of Tyrone and over in Brooks. And we taxpayers have not forgotten you recently unloaded a new, $10 million school for 50 cents on the dollar.
And yet you didn’t have the money to fix a little septic tank at the Tyrone school.
Look more closely at what is on the web, and don’t return phone calls from the salesman on that $200,000 program. Unless you are bigger suckers than I think you are.
James Hightower
Tyrone, Ga.cheaper web solutions
