Saturday, March 29, 2008

Teed Off by Principal's Golf Cart

This from the Washington Post:

Some Question Need, Expense
The redesigned $87 million Richard Montgomery High School, flagship of the Montgomery County school system, occupies a building that's as long as two football fields. So Moreno Carrasco, the principal, decided to purchase a golf cart to help him get around.

This has not gone over well with some in the school community.

Parent activists have seized on the golf cart as a symbol of administrative excess in a school system that is asking everyone else to endure cuts. Superintendent Jerry D. Weast has curtailed all but essential spending as the county seeks to close a $297 million budget deficit.

"It gets to the point where you have to laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation," wrote Jeanne Taylor, a Silver Spring parent, on the e-mail list of the Parents Coalition of Montgomery County. "A teacher hiring freeze is on and kids are being denied services left and right -- but we can buy golf carts." ...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is more economical for a school to have a means of transportation to get to one place or the other - by means of this golf cart..than to have the administration sitting on their butts and doing nothing. Almost every school out there has golf carts as part of their maintenance team. It's cheaper than gas powered vehicles and if you add Solar for Golf Carts, it's a no brainier. Almost free to run.

Richard Day said...

As to the false dichotomy; You mean, like give me a golf cart or I'm going to sit on my butt? If that's the only choice, he should of course be fired.

How about this: get off your butt and hustle down to the gym. He didn't use a cart laying around the utility shed. He went out and bought himself one.