At 3 p.m. Wednesday afternoon, schools Superintendent Rick Smith goes before the Hamilton County mayor and commission to present his budget, which asks for $34 million more to, as Smith puts it, make our public schools the best in the South.
It will be a tough crowd. Many are opposed to Smith’s proposal — funded perhaps by a property tax increase — and, for the sake of full and democratic discourse and debate, their main argument needs to be heard.
It goes something like this.
We already spend $345 million a year on schools, with nothing spectacular to show for it. Test scores remain low. In some schools, freshmen read on a first-grade level. In others, many seniors aren’t ready for college.
And what happened to the Race to the Top money? And iZone funding? Haven’t we already spent enough?