Don't Renew... Speech to the USOE

BY TRADING NOT EVEN 1/8 of one year's worth of education funding through the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund, Utah got a waiver from a few of No Child Left Behind's most draconian measures while at the same time chaining ourselves to:

1) national standards
2) a national accountability system
3) a national system of teacher and principal grading tied to test scores,
4) a federally funded state wide database built to data mine our students.
All of which has debased curriculum in this state.

Now we're being told that we can't step away from federal bondage because our schools can't go through budgets and find somewhere to save less than ½ of one percent of Utah's education budget.

I often attend the Davis School Board meetings. This week the board voted to spend $760,000 on solar panels for A SINGLE school using bond money. Utahns don't vote for bonding because they think we need solar panels, they vote for bonding because they are told class sizes are too large and teacher pay too small.

So, there's three quarter of a million dollars for something that is pottage compared with our freedom.

Trading money for liberty is not progress. And, it's hurt our children. And, it's hurt their future.


In the Lord of the Rings, Gandalf once said:
It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule. [Gandalf in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (New York: Ballantine Books, 1965), p. 190]

Let us master ourselves. Restore local control.

I would like to present to the board, the signatures of 2,107 Utahns, collected in just the past 24 hours,  who are begging you not to renew this waiver.

SFSF APPLICATION

SFSF ALLOCATION

Deseret News Article