Scholastic transportation in the State of California is the safest means of transporting students to and from their respective educational sites in the United States. The Department of Education states this unequivocally.
Governor Jerry Brown and the California Legislature have made recent cuts to school transportation requirements, which endanger this.
I quote State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson who has stated, “It is a sad day for California. Taking hundreds of millions of dollars from our schools, on top of the $18 billion in cuts they have already suffered, will only make life harder for students in California”s chronically underfunded schools.” Torlakson further states, “Mothballing school bus fleets across the state will mean many rural, disabled and low-income students will have no safe way to get to school.”
There was a time that the Democratic Party was an organization bred to safe-guard the very people it is now forcing into the already burdensome unemployment roles of California and now Lake County, that according to sources, suffers from a 19.2 percent unemployment figure with the potential layoff of these dedicated school bus drivers.
Once, our California schools were heralded as some of the very best this nation had of offer, but sadly this is no longer fact. We must realize when governors and legislators make education a target for cuts; they leave us knowing that this is not the kind of education we wish for. This is not the California our children deserve. Too quickly our Governor and legislators target education, law enforcement and firefighting organizations with these crippling cuts in funding instead of finding alternatives.
One such alternative is immediate cessation of funding to illegal immigrants and the growing bureaucracy that is crippling California.
Remember, by and large our schools are funded on a mathematical equation based on average daily attendance (ADA) and in our rural areas, this will certainly mean a drop in attendance that is unacceptable.
We must, as citizens of Lake County, inform our elected officials that organized and trained school transportation as it stands is the safest form of getting our children to and from school and they must restore these millions of dollars they have cut.
It is simple; if we allow school districts to cut transportation, we will add unemployment that is already among the highest in the state and decimate our ADA, further crippling education to say nothing of jeopardizing the safety of our Lake County students.
I for one, find this a callous and thoughtless act by Governor Jerry Brown and the California Legislators.
We all see the waste in state government and I beseech Brown and his fellow democrats in the legislature of California to restore this critical funding by any means possible. Leave our children alone and give them a safe California school system we can all have a measure of pride in.
Sherman Baker
Kelseyville
