Enid Public School System's appetite for lots of money and the DNC's new media apocalypse

Enid Public Schools hired a Media Specialist, media degree and all, plus an assistant, with the stated goal of getting kids up to speed for professional media even before they get to high school, let alone college.  Enid Public Schools was the recipient of one of PEGASYS' old channels claiming that it's an education channel when the local colleges remain confined to Chautauqua access to the Public Access channel instead.  What the Enid Public Schools board discussed at one point was just putting sports on the EPS TV channel (forget education--they talked about raking in local business/corporate sponsorship money for the sports deals while excluding KXOK-LPTV from these commercial revenues).  No talk about tutoring shows like PEGASYS used to have--just a grand circus of kids rattling their brains about on the football field--makes you understand why they don't have high expectations for math and science in the first place.  But what's the tie-in with the DNC media situation that just cropped up about televising their next debate?

Well, their recent brawl over media coverage of their next debate involves dropping a media sponsor over the fact that in the professional world, all those media positions that the EPS wants to train Enid kids for are union jobs, and this particular dust-up is between the DNC and an ABC network affiliate's Hearst owner over that affiliate's anti-union position, specifically IBEW (my old union).  That affiliate's on-camera people will be disallowed from any role in presenting the next DNC debate because of Hearst's position on union production crew.

I've said it before and I'll repeat this as often as needed: in training youngsters for media professions, the EPS is grooming future union members, right in the middle of a supposedly conservative city inside of a supposedly conservative state.  Hey--if it sounds like a liberal and it parties on public money like a liberal, you can bet it's a liberal regardless of how they've actually registered at the Election Board.  Enid, you're rabidly liberal from the inside out.  If you vote in favor of that chunk of money the EPS is begging for, you can bet they won't spend it on academic education--they're traditionally allergic to math and science.

Wednesday UPDATE, Enid High Christmas Concert Edition: Attended this last night and everywhere you look you can spot spending excesses all the way down to that slick 6-page full color flier handed out with the single-page programme, urging parents and all other attendees to vote in favor of handing over a truckful of tax money for more excess spending:

 This is the cover, on a sheet of paper folded over, printed both sides, constituting page 1, page 2, page 5, page 6.  There was only a printed page 3, constituted of a piece of paper printed only on one side, where page 4 was just blank.

Nowhere in this flier, nor in Dr. Floyd's speech, were improvements in tutoring, math, or science mentioned. His big applause line was that he intends to construct a world class fine arts center, and I guess it's because the parents think every kid's best career choice is to become another Garth Brooks because becoming an NFL football star wasn't good enough. All Enid parents with kids who have an interest and a high aptitude for math and science will continue to be screwed over by EPS.  I will be posting the vid of Dr. Floyd's speech on YouTube then link it here, ere long.

Seriously, Enidites--remember when the nitrogen plant's water was an issue, with the nitrogen plant seeking the quality of water that the then-city manager, Eric Benson, had to tell the plant representative that Enid just didn't have people with the required skill set?  As  long as EPS pursues fru-fru projects like arts to the exclusion of math and science, Enid will NEVER be able to provide workers with even the basics of the skill set required by manufacturing--the only thing Enid kids will have the skill set for is Skid Row after they all attempt to become stars in what we know as liberal media, where only 2 or 3 out of triple-digit thousands actually succeed.  What EPS is good at is training kids for a high failure rate.

From that same slick 6-paged spam flier, items that set red flags IMHO:

I grade this paper as a D+.

There are ONLY TWO science items on this whole page.

What percentage of these expenditures comes from local property taxes? How about a comparison of communities with peer ad velorem tax bases per student capita? A school system run by a superintendent who thinks math isn't a priority gets a license to perform snowjobs with numbers.

...and here we go, on YouTube at last...but...it's a preliminary version, to the point, sort of.

The flier states that Oklahoma law prohibits bond money to be used to pay personnel or teachers with, but Oklahoma--Enid--still has a teacher crisis.  Paying for just an upgrade in security is one thing, but there's a bigger chunk of pork getting slid under the wire with a genuine need, but only one genuine need. The other is teachers, and if we can't pay just for security upgrade and teachers, none of the rest of that top-heavy over-larded pork is going to give kids an education.

See also my previous post about the complete contempt that both Enid and the state of Oklahoma have for science and mathematics, despite what students there are that spoke up in favor of such.

Prior to the EPS Board's consideration of the bond issue, initially, somebody was running news paper ads like this one:

Enid voters know that the terms of the bond was reworked, and it's that reworked bond that I just critiqued to shreds above.  But this entity hasn't run any anti-bond ads in the paper lately.  I'm guessing that this entity was less interested in actual education with actual "basic school essentials" but more interested in getting in on the pork action...because by November of last year, the entity was running the following ad:

As you can clearly see from the above analysis of the reworked bond, as advertised by none other than the EPS superintendent himself, both the ad and the superintendent ensured no mention of "basic school essentials".  "Expands Enid's economy" via all the pork provisions but doesn't prepare any student for the world of working for any serious industry that might move to Enid to do business.  Those industries have high quality jobs to offer but nobody in any fine arts program is going to qualify for any of them and not even Autry Tech can work with students without basic grade school grasp of math and science.

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Sunday mini-UPDATE: Since I posted the above, much continues to be made of the statewide major budget shortfall, estimated somewhere around $1 billion--billion, with a B--and how current state tax exemptions were issued to businesses in the name of handing out  pro-business "incentives".  Oklahoma Watch talked about how an Oklahoma railroad spike manufacturer has gotten this "incentive" for decades, for instance, and I've gotta chime in and say that this is another area where the conservative majority, thinking that it was turning harder right, actually took a left turn in establishing government subsidy of what's supposed to be a free market while proclaiming that government should be so small that it should be near-death anemic, as in near the point of anarchy.

Conservatives have forgotten that the goal of being in business is to be self sustaining, to MAKE money, not suck up money.  Conservatives have forgotten that a free market is supposed to pick winners and losers, yet here they are electing a majority government where the government supports determine that everybody is a winner, with no losers.  Sorry, that's not conservative.  A free market is conservative.  If a business whines that it's gonna die without that incentive 15 years after start-up, it's not a viable business, and that even goes for railroad spike manufacturers.  Here's a reminder of what principles conservatives used to say that they subscribed to:

• A business that fails to make money without being propped up deserves to die--the market has spoken.
•  Government is necessary for those things that make the markets operate: roads and bridges, utilities, and no meddling in markets.  So yeah--it needs to raise revenue, and the way it raises revenue is thru taxes.  Taxes are a patriotic thing to pay when the money is spent on stuff government should properly spend money on.
• People vote down tax hikes for governments that blow money on stuff governments have no business spending money on, like, say, throwing lavish public parties that have no impact on attracting new business and fostering old business retention, keeping in mind that residents are the work force that businesses require to operate.

Remember Dubya's BRAC program, the Base Realignment and Closing program?  Military bases are things that the federal government is supposed to spend money on, but here were states and cities scrambling to kick in their own cash to save their bases from closure.  What happened then, too, is that even conservatives voted for a tax hike, and in Enid, the EPS already benefitted from THAT huge bucket of money.  We kept Vance, alright, but where did EPS put it all?  Did they build a hollow leg in their featherbed (read "back pocket") for further lining? That ain't right, people, but the ideologues who wanted the feds to spend less didn't reduce the costs--all they did was just shift the cost from the federal government in the name of tax reduction and sent the bill for the bases to the states and cities, all of whom gladly raised their own taxes to cover the difference.  So don't even try to tell me that conservatives don't like tax hikes--to a man they all voted for THOSE taxes on the state and local level when it wasn't state and local business to do that in the first place; that's the fed's responsibility.

Please.

There's an old BBS-era tagline that reads, "Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do"--and here we're seeing the right wing demonstrating the truth of that.  They've turned so far right that they've turned left.

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Monday UPDATE: Headlining top, front, all the way across, was revenue woes for Enid, which continues to party like it's 1999:

Previously, the paper reported declining revenues EXCEPT for Kingfisher County.  All the promotional crap that the City Commission dumped big bucks into, all the way from their media propaganda arm they call Enid Television Network to Main Street Enid simply had less than zero effect on Enid's economic prospects.  The addition of the Walmart Neighborhood Market made less than zero effect on Enid's economic prospects.  Sure, there's a new major housing development going up next to it, as yet still under construction, but that construction began under a housing squeeze environment, and not having completed construction yet, petroleum/gas producers are cutting back on their demand for people--a situation not helped by the state shutting down disposal wells because of the earthquake problem.  Build a new building, shake it at the foundation, and your brand new building gets junked...or, at best, in need of major structural repair usually including foundation rework.  All very expensive.

But Enid's City Commission is hell bent on making Enid's downtown the party capital of the world without also having suitable businesses occupying retail space downtown for the party-goers to shop at.  They congratulated themselves at a Study Session for having spacious parking lots (they razed retail buildings to do it) nowhere near where parking is still a tight squeeze, and that's around the high rise buildings. 

I've been meaning to put together a video showing this particular circus tent of Commission Follies but I've not had two minutes I could rub together this holiday season, so quality time devoted to video production is just going to have to wait til next month.  Yep, the New Year.  But by all means do stay tuned.

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Saturday Update: I broke down the EPS flier into blow-by-blow bits and posted those on Twitter, and got Favorited a few times, and a couple of reTweets, so word is definitely getting out. I've said it before and I'll say it often: somebody needs to Tom Coburn this place because it's become out of hand Porklandia.

In yellow,items covered by a previously passed tax hike. In orange, PORK--except in the names of the schools. In that case, it's the level of the school that is important compared to the equipment intended for installation therein.

And then there's the matter of the expense a previous administration spent on installing carpets on the walls in the first place, being undone by more expense incurred by the current administration. Nuts.

This must have been a case of Floyd overlooking an opportunity to lard up pork on Garfield.

Again with the carpet on the walls.

One science item for one school. Only one other school got a science item and that was a middle school, too. But by the time the kids graduate and head for high school, the scientifically talented kids get shafted.