Layoffs At Guilford County Schools

An article yesterday raised the specter of lay-offs in the Guilford County Schools system resulting from the county commissioner’ budget.

Yes, there will be human costs, just as when a private business or corporation has to lay people off. But this situation is something we should view as almost having been inevitable.

We don’t have as many kids in traditional public schools as we used to have.

Why? First, there are fewer kids.

But also, there is intense competition from charter schools, private schools, Christian schools and home schooling. MANY families are turning to these alternatives.

In some cases, these parents desire a moral, Christian education for their kids that is not influenced by the woke public schools. In many cases, they perceive (often correctly) that the public schools don’t educate nearly as well as the available alternatives. And there are disorderly, unsafe conditions in the public schools that leaders are unwilling to fix.

In any case, private companies have to make these kinds of real-world decisions to lay people off with some regularity.

The fact is that we had declining demand for public education locally for many years. Yet, costs kept going up– both operational and capital. It made no sense. And virtually nobody was asking the tough questions.

Skip Alston blamed the state for the choices that the county commissioners made. He was being entirely disingenuous because the budget he passed was a political decision made by his crowd. He raised taxes, but the local education establishment wanted more.