Lies Lies LIES!!

“There are literally teachers now who are getting pink slips, who are getting notices that they can’t come back this fall,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“We don’t have any ability with dumb cuts like this to figure out what the right thing to do is. It just means that a lot more children will not get the kinds of services and opportunities they need,” Duncan said.

On Wednesday, when pressed for more details, Sec. Duncan named a county in West Virginia that was getting dealt a deck of pink slips. Turns out, not only was this part of a sequester deal, it wasn't even true. There was some shuffling of teachers that may be occurring in West Virginia next year, but a far cry from a man with a hand written card board sign draped over his shoulders crying about the apocalyptic image that he was trying to paint. 

There are going to be some tough times coming with these sudden cuts, so why does the White House feel it necessary to act like the sky is falling? Well, lets break down the math a bit and find out how this is going to hurt me, or more specifically, since I have very minimal direct reliance on the federal government, how this sequester will harm my local school district, Linn-Mar school district in Iowa. 

The Sequester for the remainder of this fiscal year is about $85,000,000,000.00 to the federal budget, 

half of this goes to defense, leaving $42,500,000,000.00 for domestic programs.

The Department of Education state allocations is getting hit with about $712,500,000.00, or 1.67% of domestic cuts.

according to the White House, Iowa's education hit will be $6,400,000.00, or 0.89% of the education cuts. 

In 2011, Iowa received around $506,900,000.00 from the federal government for education

Iowa's cut from the fed is about 1.3% of federal education funding to the state.

Total enrollment in K-12 for Iowa is over 473,000 students

so the cuts equal about $13.50 per student. 

Linn-Mar school district is responsible for a bit over 6600 students, 1.4% of Iowa enrollment. 

Linn-Mar school district is responsible for a decrease of roughly $89,000

Linn-Mar's budget for 2012 was $113,266,000.00 dollars

My School's budget chart shows 3% of funds come from Fed.

This cut is less then one tenth of one percent for my school district, and this assumes that all cuts will be rolled over directly to the district budgets, the direct impact will probably be much less. That's it, we could potentially lose one position, obviously no one wants to let a teacher or aide go, but if you follow the school budget link above, you may have noticed something. The school's budget has been dropping, by a lot, in 2011, the budget was $20 million more, in 2010, there was $47 million more budgeted. Iowa's been through a way more dramatic, sudden cuts, before, so maybe it's a bit of a thick skin that I've grown in the face of budget cuts that makes me scoff at the idea that we may be out of what amounts to peanuts, because even with cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts to education, our school district, on top of being one of the largest school districts in Iowa that does not have a income sir-tax. Our school district was able to drop it's tax levy. That's right, our taxes are falling. 

Try again Mr. Duncan, you're lying, your exaggerating, and quite frankly, I think this whole issue is going to show how little we really need a Federal Department of Education.