Oh no! We can’t possibly have competition! Children are seen as crops in the field by public school systems and get very paranoid when someone dares encroach on their gravy train. Many do not have confidence in the public school system and that is precisely why parents seek alternatives. The bureaucrat has it exactly backwards.

I would like to know why a public school child thinks a light bulb and a refrigerator use the same amount of electricity.

I’d like to know why a public school child wants to save the planet but thinks mommy idling the SUV four hours each day in front of her tinder date’s house is not polluting as much as an evil light bulb. Thousands of other examples available.

Point is schools are not educating the youth accurately or honestly. Schools are knowingly and intentionally filling children full of incorrect useless made up social crap. Children leave high school wanting an engineer’s pay but too stupid to collect the shopping carts at Wal-Mart. (Let’s not even get started with the gay recruitment agenda, born 1.5% of the population with a 10% goal.)

This overall is in fact the communist agenda. It is alive and well in Boise schools. Stupid youth make good liberals. Liberals hate America… the only place on earth they won’t be eaten for dinner, but they are liberals so nothing makes any sense, at all, ever. In fact if you dare make sense to a liberal…. a girlfriend from forty years ago will claim you passed out on top of her at a really good party.

Shades of the ’50s. The commies have taken over the schools!! Our public schools do need to take a hard look at what the private schools offer. I know a lot of pretty intelligent adults that couldn’t tell the difference between a watt hour and a lunch hour or what a fridge vs a light bulb uses. I also know quite a few kids, from grade school through high school who a very smart. Visit a high school science class and see if you can pass the science exam. Lets be proactive and help the schools identify the problem rather than claiming our education system has been taken over by the “commies”.

EDITOR NOTE–GEO, would you also endorse good education and teachers over a $175,000 ad campaign trying to sell the status quo?

GEO, what do you think Bernie Sanders is? He is a mainstream American commie. Who did the teachers want to elect? The Red Scare of the 1950s was based in reality and so is this problem. Comrade, if Hillary had not cheated to get the nomination Bernie would be President.

There is a great deal of junk science being taught in the schools, in a similar fashion to the junk math and junk history. Al Gore the car salesman is considered a god like science expert. George Washington was white therefore America is bad (history). Girl points finger and boy must be incinerated (social studies). They are teaching rubbish. I know an award winning public school teacher who needed help figuring out the area of a 10 x 10 room. The bar is very low intentionally.

Teachers are the biggest union in the country and can’t figure out how to get themselves a living wage. The public money goes up in smoke with seven layers of administration, overly expensive school buildings, and juicy contracts awarded to political friends. As someone pointed out the kids are just a cash crop for the machine. The whole mess is overseen by government swamp monsters pledging to mess stuff up so we will vote them even more money to fix it. It is sabotage.

Government screws up everything it touches. The public schools and the VA medical system are good examples of this fact. If you want to be proactive, if you want to fix it, get the political agenda out of the schools. Best way to do so is to give parents a choice and thereby taking the money away from the public school swamp. Boeing and Airbus compete and both are better companies and better consumer experiences because of it. Can you imagine the quality of our vehicles if only one state owned company built them comrade? Our public schools are the equivalent of the Russian ZiL automobile comrade. Of course they need a large advertising budget to sell junk like that.

EDITOR NOTE–Please stay on the topic! This is a local issue of spending. Also your comments are twice as long as the original story. The GUARDIAN is a forum for public comment, not a place to troll.

Absurd rubbish. Where is the Governor on this? More evidence the the Government could care less about the judicious use of taxpayer money – and will extort the taxpayer to shore up its inept operations without shame. If parents opt out of public ‘education” (as we did) this a pure exercise of freedom, in a free society. The more this happens, the better, as the evidence is substantively clear that our public schools are of dubious merit.

To Editor:
I certainly do not appreciate the school board authorizing $175,000 for advertising. There certainly are better uses for this money rather than enriching local media outlets.

We are talking about the future of our children here and they should have the best education our school system can deliver. So yes, I support a quality public school education and an educated well paid and skilled teaching staff. This can only happen with adequate funding from the state (which is not happening) and public support.

I believe the public school system is missing a great opportunity by not outreaching to the professional retired community to assist in teaching. They can bring real life experience in business, science, math and other subjects. We certainly have a lot of retired professionals in area.

As a retired geologist I would be honored to assist in teaching an earth science class under the guidance of an experienced teacher. Not only would the science students gain real knowledge in the practical applications of science but also the teachers who for the most part only repeat what they learned at the university or college. Certainly a better use of $175,000.

So the school district has declining attendance? That should mean no more bonds or extra levies in the future correct? While $175,000 is small in their overall budget it is not money wisely spent. As evidenced by comments here, it will be a publicity nightmare. I am pretty sure that money would be beeter served with an additional teacher or counselor.

More of “Us vs Them”.

Religious and Political
It’s tough for religious zealots to send their kids to Sunday School on a Sunday to be told Earth is less than a million years old; Noah’s flood created our geology; Adam and Eve were first; our climate is constant; and ‘we are the chosen ones’… then on Monday for public education to say exactly the opposite- by expressing true science.

Elitism and Powerful.
On the other end of the spectrum are the rich elite people who find it beneath them to send their precious Zoe to a public school with ‘those other kids’.
So they find it perfectly acceptable to have their nanny drive Zoe across town, spewing fumes from their SUV jamming up traffic, to their ELITE charter school- to learn the same stuff.

This campaign is simply the School District fighting against those other messages.

It is not worth spending so much money, but it is certainly an issue that needs to get in the public sphere.

Boise Schools are top notch and rank highly in the country.
The same can not be said for all Idaho Schools (parents!).

Easterner is right on! The Albertsons family has spent HUNDREDS of millions of $$ on education in idaho (not all of it very successfully), and has seen NOTHING SUBSTANTIVE in overall learning.

Go figure…

Public School is terribly broken because they take our money by force. Therefore no motivation to produce a quality product. We need to make them compete for funding like every other industry producing a quality product. A good start would be to mandate any and all school related elections to only the one big election day in November and force whatever their issue is to be included on the only ballot that day (end stealth elections).

Lots of love from me to the lonely quality teachers who care so much, but look how the schools treat them. How dare they disrupt the cash cow.

https://idahonews.com/news/nation-world/teacher-says-she-was-fired-for-giving-zeroes-to-students-who-didnt-turn-in-their-work-09-25-2018-134627104

Yossarian, you are coming from a position that schools suck.
How about the more accurate position that too many parents suck?

Is it REALLY the individual teacher’s responsibility, or are they simply one cog in the wheel to facilitate learning?

Teachers have ZERO responsibility to get a student to do homework.
They have ZERO responsibility over whether that student has decent sleep.
They have ZERO responsibility over whether that student is focused on the subject or the boy/girl sitting next to them.
And that list goes on and on- ALL which falls on the responsibility of parents.

Too many parents are failing.

Above comments want schools to ‘compete for students’- This is EXACTLY what they are planning to due, to the tune of $170,000. It is unfortunate they find it necessary.

There is zero evidence ‘School Choice’ provides an equal improvement for ALL children. See Michigan and Devos as the failing model https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2018/03/12/betsy-devos-michigan-minutes/32857789/

School Choice only dilutes the public resources and makes a difficult goal even more difficult.

As for any kind of ‘liberal agenda’- yeah right, A, B, C, reading phonics, and the scientific method are so liberal. That rubbish rhetoric that does nothing to advance the goals of good education for children.

The concept of PUBLIC schools is unique to creating democracy in America.
“Education … beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men—the balance-wheel of the social machinery.” -Horace Mann

To argue against great, EQUAL, public education is simply arguing in favor of Marxism with a proletariat and bourgeoisie class of people. THAT is the choice!

Eastie, because of public schools intruding into the family with the commie agenda the parents no longer have authority over their children. If a parent dare discipline their child the school and CPS authorities will swoop in and empower the child to disobey the parent. Brought to you by commie liberals wanting to destroy the American family unit. They have been successful. Today’s parents are also a product of the same corrupted system of conditioning. They don’t bother to be, and don’t want to be, what you call “good parents” because they were taught not to be and threatened with criminal punishment if they do dare step up.

“The government will take care of you.” If some of you think commie is the wrong label, think again.

Easter

For 20 years I was steeped in Leftist culture and have read all the usual promotions of how our public education is the epitome of “democracy.” Everything from Noam Chomsky (who hated his public school education BTW) to any current blather from Dem education promoters.

In the abstract, I actually still believe in a public funded education, but now I can see that cultural agendas serve along with social promotion gimmicks to dumb down kids and deliver them to our society with predetermined concepts that America needs to be anti-sovereign and part of some World Society without borders and constitutions that protect national interests. It’s all very John Lennon Imagine crap. Except, that what they are selling isn’t world Love through equality, but that equality will be achieved by making everyone poor (except for that 1% of know-it-alls that make the rules = Lenin).

I ask people, adults mind you, that don’t even know how money enters the economy. They all think the Govt prints it and injects it. That can happen via bonds sold to private entities, but MOST money enters every time a private loan is made at a bank. It’s printed out of thin air and loaned to borrowers. That’s called principal. Banks are allowed to loan $10 for every $1 they have on deposit. This is not taught to anyone. It’s the most important aspect of economies and no one knows it.

My next door neighbor is a top score student in high school. She is not aware of most facts because they don’t teach them any. They teach for tests steeped in minutiae. World history is not even a serious subject anymore. With everything that is going on, where are the debates and facts? It’s all being handled by Tech Giants via social media. What a joke.

Clancy- if I request to “watch a class” in history or American Govt, would that be approved? In France, all parents are barred from any intervention in their kids’ school activities. Are we next?

Finland is the top dog in education. They actually teach critical skills there. They rarely test. But if you point them out to today’s progressives, you get a lecture about how “white and racist” Finland is. Which is funny because Finland used to be a go-to example for leftists for how America should follow.

It is hard to see how with continued expansion of charter schools that public schools will improve. Charter schools are public schools, but with screening. Correct?

What has always been needed is a referendum on how many children a family can put into the free public/charter schools system without having to pay for some extra services. (Not football, etc., just overall overload of costs, including free lunch.)

It is suspicious that it kills the budget by contracting at the end of the fiscal year. Public secondary and elementary schools don’t need to advertise. Parents want to send their kids to schools. Bad decision BSD.