How is the Park City School Board Getting Educated on Finance?

Do you ever turn on the History Channel and expect to see something about Napolean’s escape from Elba but instead there is a 7 day marathon of Ancient Aliens? You probably don’t deny there could be aliens but the crackpots make you want to never hear about another alien again. The same can be said of watching Fox News or MSNBC. Either way, some political party is out to destroy the “American way of life.” Either way, it’s so biased that you discount everything said.

We felt that way when we viewed a recent Powerpoint presented to Tuesday’s Park City School Board. The title of the presentation was “School Finance 101.” We were looking through the document trying to better understand how schools are funded. Yet we were met with pictures of crazy people, confused babies, people ripping their hair out, Photoshopped sheep, and very…very….very sad children. For some reason we kept reading and got past that to view charts and tables about how other school districts pay hardly anything for their children to go to school while Park City residents pay everything. We read about how Utahns were “robbing Peter to Pay Paul” and how there were wolf in sheep’s clothing. We read about how higher education was taking all the money from school districts like Park City.

While we are sure there are merits to some of the arguments, we felt like we were watching Al Sharpton on MSNBC tells us why “The Republicans are to blame for everything” or Rush Limbaugh educating the “Truthers” on why “Obama” should be impeached over his birth certificate. My god. We would just ignore it all, but it makes us wonder if this is the norm in our schools. We keep hearing about “Professional Learning Centers” and how our students learn to use logic to become better citizens. Yet, if this is an example of the way ideas are taught, we think perhaps those devising the curriculum have gotten the wrong message on propaganda from George Orwell.

To be fair this presentation was initially created by someone within the Ogden School District, but frankly we were shocked that a document like this would be presented to the Park City School Board at all. We just hope that during the meeting they actually discussed school finance in an objective manner and didn’t rely on a biased presentation with an obvious agenda to “educate” them on funding of schools.

You should take a look and see what you think.