The Sunday talk shows last week focused on two topics: the fiscal cliff the issues arising from the recent elementary school shootings, including putting security people in the public schools and increasing services for the mentally ill.<\/p>\n
You\u2019d think the two subjects existed on two different planets.\u00a0 Nobody mentioned that one topic was about reducing the cost of government and the other was about new potentially expensive programs.\u00a0 Wayne La Pierre of the National Rifle Association was quoted as saying, \u201cWith all the money in the federal budget can\u2019t we afford to put a police officer in every single school?\u201d\u00a0 Where\u2019s he been?<\/p>\n
How much would armed security officers in every elementary school cost?\u00a0 If we entrust the lives of children to these officers, we have to pay them adequately.\u00a0 What salary should they get \u2013 more than teachers, perhaps? \u00a0Let\u2019s have a nice calm chat about that, shall we?<\/p>\n
New mental health services are being called for \u2013 or replacements for mental health services that used to exist (however imperfect the service or unscientific the knowledge base) that were closed partly for budget reasons.<\/p>\n
Some of these services properly belong in the public schools, perhaps in high schools, where they could screen large numbers of young people for potential problem kids who might go off the deep end some day.<\/p>\n
Wait a second.\u00a0 Haven\u2019t we heard numerous pleas from educators to fund more counseling services, not only to catch the potentially violent but also reaching out to all troubled kids, the boys on the verge of giving up on education and possibly \u00a0joining criminal gangs, the girls who might make a sadly uninformed decision that would lead to early pregnancy and a life of semi-poverty at best, never doing any better than coping and spawning a new generation of kids who will repeat the pattern?\u00a0 Do taxpayers pay the cost of providing enough professionally qualified counselors to provide meaningful interventions to all these kids?\u00a0 And how much do we pay the counselors?\u00a0 More than the armed guards?<\/p>\n
Wait another second.\u00a0 This can\u2019t be left until high school because so many children drop out before they get to high school.\u00a0 The programs have to start in middle school; they must be comprehensive because the counselors must always be looking among the 12-year-olds for future mass murderers; and there must be background checks because Heaven forbid if one in a million of these counselors turns out to be a child molester.<\/p>\n
Soon there will be competition for funding between the security guard programs and the mental health programs, and one or the other, or both, will be inadequately funded, so the original intention of finding the dangerous kids will not be fulfilled.\u00a0 And meanwhile which other programs are being cut to pay for this?\u00a0 Will we see even more cuts in programs like music and art, which otherwise might have engaged some of the otherwise uninspired children and saved them from becoming dropouts?\u00a0 Will we give up entirely on math and science?\u00a0 Or just let the buildings crumble and house the kids in portable classrooms with no cooling systems or bathrooms?<\/p>\n
Or, as Mitt Romney said (and this was perhaps one of his most valid points), are these programs worth borrowing money from China to pay for?\u00a0 Because, make no mistake, that is where the money will come from unless it comes from cutting something else, perhaps from cutting the funds for maintenance of bridges and tunnels or having fewer air traffic controllers.<\/p>\n
This is how government winds up brimming over with multiplicities of half-baked, poorly performing, inadequately funded programs that don\u2019t quite achieve whatever they were created to achieve, no matter how hard the employees try to do their best.<\/p>\n
Politicians pay solemn lip service to \u201cputting everything on the table.\u201d But it\u2019s up to us to remind them that in public policy everything is related to everything else, and they have to put all these disparate and complex elements on the same table.<\/p>\n
Contact Merilee Dannemann through www.triplespacedagain.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Triple Spaced Again, \u00a9 New Mexico News Services 2012<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Sunday talk shows last week focused on two topics: the fiscal cliff the issues arising from the recent elementary school shootings, including putting security people in the public schools and increasing services for the mentally ill. You\u2019d think the … Continue reading