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San Bernardino County, CA November 6, 2012 Election
Smart Voter

Cuts and savings

By Peter Attwood

Candidate for Member, Governing Board; Chino Valley Unified School District

This information is provided by the candidate
Savings can only come by fundamental cultural change
You can always make cuts. But cuts don't yield savings, if they cost more than they save. For instance, you can cut teacher pays by increasing class sizes. But this is the equivalent of a factory speedup, and the better teachers will leave, and so will many students, maybe to a charter. 500 students out the door is a revenue loss of $2.5 million a year, so any cut that makes that happen has to save more than $2.5 million to be any saving at all. Few if any actual savings of that sort are possible at this point, only destructive cuts.

The low-hanging fruit in our district is incompetent decisions caused by the tolerance of lying - to the board, and to parents. The closing of the 3 schools and several instances of expensive and pointless litigation are good examples. Managers that allow themselves to be lied to cannot get good information, and so they cannot make good decisions. Parents that are lied to cannot work with the district to get good results for their kids, and that loss of cooperative work is incalculable.

By being straight with people, the district can earn trust and get a lot more done with less fighting, and so at much lower cost, without cutting anything useful. This has not even been tried, since the good changes early in the new Superintendent's tenure, which were very helpful but were not followed up.

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ca/sbo Created from information supplied by the candidate: November 3, 2012 09:23
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