Fw: Another twist...suing the state for failure to fund the STRS

From RH Jones, June 5, 2010
Subject: Re: Another twist...suing the state for failure to fund the STRS

Dave and all:

As a retired teacher and also a local taxpayer, I know dollars will come to my local public schools if my tax dollars were not going into charter schools, and the like. Even the 1% that goes to "home schoolers" takes away from the 2.5% employer increase that thinking people are requesting to help our OH STRS; also, it is no mystery to me, as to why we all should properly fund our traditional public school systems. As Abe Lincoln once said, well over 100-years ago to the effect that, '" we will not lose our freedom from without, it will be lost from within". As voters leave their air-conditioned homes in the luxury of their air-conditioned vehicles to drive to their polling places to vote in the primary, and on Tuesday, November 2, they have no choice but to support education. For if we (they) do not, the alternative is too difficult to even imagine. Read on.

Some financial sacrifices to educate our youngsters is necessary to better our society, and our civilization. When I was in Korea during the Korean War, I saw Korean children eating out of garbage dumps and living on the streets; in rags for clothing, some were carrying their little brothers or sisters on their backs. Is this what Americans, and Ohioans in particular, want for their children and grandchildren? My dilemma is why school boards and those who sit on the STRS board do not understand this. Without our long and grand tradition of public school education, in one short generation, we can be living in total chaos, our offspring living like wild animals.

In stating the truth clearly and without concealing anything, or sparing somebody's feelings, it is no accident that, as stated in the media today, out of the last 12 spelling bees, eight of the winners have been of East Indian descent. Is that an accident? I do not think so. India is an ancient civilization, as is China and Japan. Their cultures value education, while ours, being only a little over 200 years old, obviously does not quite grasp that we are no longer in the frontier days. We have over 300 million people, and growing. Most live in cities, and to thrive in a city one must be educated. Prisons are for the uneducated, at a cost of about $50,000 per inmate per year, and most are repeat offenders. Farms are even industrializing, and require an education to stay in business. Therefore, we have no choice but to fully support education, and that includes a decent retirement for the college educated professionals who are the most desired teachers in our classrooms. Would you not want your children and grandchildren to have the best educators teaching your descendants? Taxpayers and educational board members who wish to skimp on that do so at the risk of being uncompetitive with foreign powers, especially Asia -- look at Singapore -- we can no longer hide behind the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Being provincially ignorant and by foolishly cutting education -- and our teacher retirement -- is part of the whole package, whether taxpayers like it or not: our survival depends on education. To ignore that is to be ignorant.

Robert H. Jones, retired OH STRS teacher stakeholder