Letter to editor

School financing has come full circle since settlers swooped in from the north during “the run.”

When there were a lot of families on every square mile, taxes were levied on the local land to finance a lot of school districts with one-room schools taught by one teacher per building and a volunteer board to be responsible.

Over the years, state and federal officials said they were going to give some of “their” money to public schools.

Now we have very few children per square mile and a local land tax is once again the sole support of this area's school districts. Full circle.

The early-day boards would give the teacher a list of duties and rules of conduct to follow. Some teachers brought their own fold-up desks that were convenient to transport from back east. I actually have one of those desks that a retired teacher by the name of Grace passed on to my mother. Grace never married partly because some of the one-room school boards had strong limits on the social life of the teachers. Some of the teachers brought along boxes of writing, reading and arithmetic books.

A lot has changed while that financing has been traveling full circle. I probably don't need to remind you about the details.

One of my associates commented that my last article was not funny enough. But today I am not amused by most recent changes. So there is no humor here.

That reminds me about some funny business going on right this minute. Such as someone trying to get the “building fund” money from school districts and dump it into the state pot. Also such as talk of doing away with the majority of school superintendents.

Some of you may be old enough to remember when a group of politicians wanted to do away with county courthouses and county governments. That plan called for county taxes to be put into district pots at district houses. I don't remember how the counties kept that group from pulling off that plan.

None of those pieces of funny business were humorous.

Jack Fisher