I recently came across an article on Twitter about Donald Trump donating his salary to the Department of Education. This sounds so great, and it seems like Trump is doing such a nice thing. However, the very last sentence of the article states, "The Trump administration has also proposed a 13 percent cut to the Education Department's budget, slashing it by $9.2 billion." This being said, whatever Trump donates will not even cover any of the money they are cutting. Making his "donation" useless to the Department of Education.
It is so sad to see that the public education system is just crumbling. In Delaware, one school district proposed a referendum about cutting teachers jobs and making classroom sizes even larger than they already are just so they could get more money. The other choice was a tax increase on housing or mortgage. Thankfully, they chose the tax increase or else the children in those schools would be suffering so much right now.
As a future educator, I fear that there may not even be a job out there for me after college. Which is sad because these school districts need teachers with recent education. In some schools, people have been teaching for 40+ years. So much has changed since they first began teaching, and I believe that some students suffer from that. There are very few, if any, teachers who choose to go back to school later in their career. Perhaps some of this money can go to helping teachers "renew" their education.
One of the biggest areas they seem to be cutting is the special education teachers and paraprofessionals. I may be biased because I am hoping to be a special education teacher one day, but these are some of the most important teachers in any school district. Children have many different learning styles and disabilities that it is hard for one teacher to adapt to all of them. Having these paraprofessionals gives the child the attention he needs without disrupting the teacher and causing other children to suffer.
Meanwhile, the administrative team just seems to be expanding, along with their paychecks. These are people that never walk into a classroom and never connect with the students. They just get to sit in an office and make decisions on things they know almost nothing about. That makes sense, right?
Bottom line, education is extremely important. Without it, it is very hard to get a well-paying job. I am sure some would argue that you can still have a good job without an education.
However, high paying jobs such as lawyers, doctors, nurses etc. would be nothing without an education. Not everyone needs to be in those professions, but even in basic jobs like food service you could find yourself performing better with a good education.
I know that some people think that the money given to school districts and even the Department of Education is not used effectively. So instead of focusing on cutting funds and laying off teachers, why not focus on strategies for using the money in better ways.
No child deserves to be crammed into a classroom with 40 other children. No teacher deserves to lose their job that they worked very hard to get. No school district deserves to have their funding cut.
This country and the rest of the world deserve to have a quality education. This can be achieved if we choose to stop being money hungry and greedy and start focusing on finding ways to give children a proper education.
After all, these children are the future. Do you not want the people that will take care of you to be educated? Think about that the next time you choose to cut funding.
