now, since i do not have the sheer skills of invective as of that of some members of this board, anyone who comes in is welcome to post their own brand of set-paper-on-fire-if-spoken-aloud obscenity strings. otherwise, i am putting only limited profanity in this OP.
the Blue Valley school district of Kansas City, for some reason, has been using a very inefficient method of tax distribution to it’s school systems. there might be a reason behind it, but i don’t know. the state uses a per student devision of finances, so the places where the money comes in from is not where it goes to. there are good reasons behind this, and this is not a rant about that.
what this is a rant about, however is the fact that the blue valley school system did not notice that it was running in a deficit for the last five years. it only now noticed, or at least, told anyone that it was going to run $7 million over budget and would have to cut a goodly number of programs. what really irks me about this is that my latin teacher learned that latin was a program that was prospectively going to be cut from the newspaper’s column on the subject. what irks me more is that noone even told her of the publicly open hearing for whether to keep latin in the elective curriculum until about two weeks before it was scheduled to occur. what irks me most is that apperently they gave my teacher a pay increase and (non binding) assurance of job security for three years at the end of last school year, though latin has apperently been on the “cut” agenda since january.
now, i’m not too sorry for my teacher. people with teaching degrees who can speak fluent latin are in high demand, and she was thinking of moving back to oklahoma anyway until they made her that offer at the start of the summer.
no, what i am angered at is that they have seriously fucked all the students who were planning on making latin their four year language.
you see, the school has a language requirement of two years minimum to graduate. i will meet that requirement at the end of this year, but, in addition to the graduation requirement, many colleges require four years of any single language at high school level to attend. with only two years, i and anyone else who was taking latin one, two or three will be screwed out of a four year set.
me and a few other people in my class are currently trying to organize an argument for at least a continuing latin series for those who were relying on it as their four year language. generally, it relies on facts like “the SAT scores of the average four-year latin student is thirty to forty points higher than those of other four-year language students, and nearly a hundred and sixty points higher than students who took no languages at all.” that was in chart form with numbers, but it is impossible to post a chart to the SDMB, so i couldn’t.
anyway, that’s my rant. if anyone has some choice invective to add, or maybe some helpful comments, please feel free to share. the brighter fire warms more.