Comments by il_miglione
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Posted on May 30 at 1:04 p.m.
There IS no right way for the state to save this much money. Too bad voters didn't get that before the election. At least these potential closures--and they are unbelievable--make the state's fiscal situation evident to everybody. What will it take before a majority of voters grow up and recognize that they need to pay their way?
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Posted on May 23 at 3:01 p.m.
At least one thing is clear about this sorry little controversy: William Robinson has done the university a disservice at a very sensitive moment.
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Posted on February 23 at 6:13 p.m.
This situation is totally out of hand. We need more police officers and we need them in the neighborhoods to prevent this kind of thing.
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Posted on February 22 at 10:29 p.m.
Lopker and Alcorn say that total compensation (salary plus benefits) for county employees was "up 34 percent during the past five years," but they don't say what that went to pay for. If most or all of it went to maintaining health care benefits at previous levels, which is likely, then these county employees are merely treading water. If the employee-paid portion of their premium has also risen, they may actually be taking home less money than they did five years ago. The surging cost of health care is not the fault of local governments; they are victims just like everybody else. The authors present no direct evidence that either pension payments or salaries for county workers have risen more quickly than inflation, or indeed that they have risen at all. As for the public/private sector comparison, it assumes that the people occupying the two categories hold positions of comparable responsibility, seniority and expertise. But the authors supply no evidence on that score. If a much higher proportion of private sector professionals are employed in lower level jobs than their public counterparts, this will skew the comparison. The relevant comparison is between people occupying like positions. In some cases, of course, such comparisons are difficult, if not impossible. There are no private sector police officers, for example. Thank goodness for that.
Posted on April 24 at 7:17 p.m.
Given the terrible budget situation, the board has done pretty well so far. The librarians are essential: they do a lot more teaching than the public and the superintendent seem to understand. Moreover, law requires that certificated personnel be present when students are in the library, and media technicians are not certificated. (If they were, the would command teacher salaries.) So without librarians, libraries would have to be closed whenever a teacher was not present. The reduction in class size for 9th-grade math is a significant loss, although the reduction did not apply to accelerated student in mixed 9th-10th grade classes anyway. On the other hand, anybody who thinks we can do without the little medical & psychiatric care we have now in our schools hasn't been reading the newspapers for the last decade. The parity idea seems only fair, but it's never a good idea to raise class size anywhere if it can possibly be avoided. There are no painless cuts to be made. The State needs to repeal the Governor's crazy DMV fee cut. That would balance the budget at a stroke.
Posted on November 1 at 1:05 p.m.
There never was a good feeling about Diaz among teachers, and most programs cut in the spring have NOT been restored. Contract negotiations with teachers were acrimonious from the start, and Diaz brought with him from Oxnard a reputation poor relations with faculty. Foreign language instruction at junior highs--to take just one example--is a mere shadow of what it was a year ago. Santa Barbara Junior high now has only one teacher doing foreign language part-time. Goleta Valley no longer has seventh-grade Spanish. Students at La Colina can no longer take any language for a full school year. Good riddance, Mr. Diaz, and please, take Mr. Sarvis with you.
Posted on October 4 at 3:51 p.m.
Mr. Sarvis presents himself as a victim of this budget mess, but as superintendent he is responsible for it: Mr. Wolf and the dubious Mr. Diaz work--or worked--for him. Moreover, it is difficult to dismiss the idea that the bad budget numbers were really an obfuscation on Sarvis's part aimed at punishing teachers for demanding and winning a much-deserved raise despite his intemperate objections. It will never be possible to attach the word "trustworthy" to Mssrs. Sarvis and Diaz again, and for this reason alone they should be replaced as soon as possible. The fact that they remain unable to give the public reliable budget numbers even now only makes their dismissal more urgent. Any other employer would have fired them months ago. As for the board, it obviously should have been following Mr. Noel's lead on this issue from the beginning. I continue to find their tolerance of incompetence--if not malfeasance--incomprehensible.
On Superintendent Brian Sarvis on Budget Woes, Mini-Victories, and the Noël Factor
Posted on September 6 at 4:38 p.m.
Thank you Mr. Noel for saying what needs to be said about the ongoing school district budget fiasco. As the parent of a SBHS student, I have been baffled by the board majority's inaction in the face of the district's stunning incompetence.
Why are Mr. Diaz and Mr. Sarvis still on the payroll? If the school district were a publicly traded company, they would now be under legal scrutiny. Why haven't the programs they told the board to cut been reinstated? Why has there been no independent investigation? What is everybody afraid of?
This is only the latest in a series of expensive and embarrassing blunders on the part of our school district administration. It's time we had a thorough house cleaning. Confidence will not be restored until we have new district leadership and independent budget management.
Meanwhile, the spring budget cuts must be reversed. It would be dishonest to retain budget reductions that were made on the basis of wildly inaccurate information.
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Posted on September 24 at 11:40 p.m.
I teach at UCSB. I held my classes today, but I allowed students to join the walk-out without being marked absent. The regents have just said they'll be voting on a 30% fee increase in November, and I think students have every right to protest that, although I don't think the university has the resources to avoid it.
It was a chaotic day today, not because of the walkout, but because budget cuts mean we don't have enough people to teach the students and class meetings were jammed with students trying desperately to enroll. I've never seen it this bad. I'm afraid that when it comes to overcrowding, the UC is going to start looking like our infamous prison system.
Readers should keep in mind that the state has been reducing its percentage of the UC budget since 1990, and it now stands at a historic low--below 20% of the total:
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/bu...
The returns that taxpayers continue to receive on their minimal investment are incalculable. Almost every medical and technological innovation of the post-war period has the UC's signature on it somewhere. The state has educated untold thousands of Californians at a fraction of the cost of private education, including not a few of the Republican lawmakers in Sacramento who are now intent on denying the same deal to today's kids. Without our system of public higher education, California and the world would be a poorer, sicker place.
So there's plenty at stake and plenty to be upset about. What we're are watching is an accelerating privatization of higher education in our state. The culprits are not in the UC President's office, as some protesters seem to think, but in Sacramento, where a minority party has a stranglehold on the state budget process. The long-term victims of privatization will not be the faculty or the staff--we might eventually be better off without Sacramento on our backs--but the people of California, who will find a UC education increasingly unaffordable for their children, and who will also see their children having to compete with more and more out-of-state students who can afford to pay the full cost of their education. The UC will become a system for economic elites, as Michigan already has.
Think about your kids, your nieces and nephews, your grandchildren. How much money do they have in their college funds? (My kid's got less than enough for a single year at the school I teach at.) Do you really want a UC that's just for rich people? That's not what I signed up for, and it's not what I found when I arrived at UCSB twenty years ago, but unless the situation in Sacramento changes soon, that's what we're all going to get.
On Protesters Target UC Regents