Steve Wilson at Mississippi Watchdog is really on the trail with regards to MS Dept of Education and the relationship it has with John Q. Porter.
Today, Wilson highlights taxpayer funded travel to Disney as well as several other conferences at resorts by Porter that cost over $10,000 just this year. In fact, the article stated that MDOE has spent $1.8 million in FY 2016 on travel.
According to Patsy Brumfield, formerly of Better Schools Better Jobs and now of the Mississippi Today publication, in an article in 2015 that $1,800,000 equates to 60 in-classroom teachers OR 18,000 textbooks OR 6,000 classroom computers in Mississippi schools. At the time she was questioning the $60,000 legal expense incurred by the Legislature to defend the Initiative 42 ballot lawsuit.
“This $60,000 expense paid by the people of Mississippi is just the tip of the iceberg for the campaign to defeat adequate funding for our schools,” Brumfield said. “That $60,000 is enough for two first-year teachers or 600 textbooks or 200 classroom computers for our schools.”
We, of course, will wait to see whether Ms. Brumfield’s new organization registers the same opinion about expenses that affect education funding as her last one did.
At a time where in-classroom education funding is so crucial to our state, this is certainly something that Legislators will look at for the upcoming LBO hearings later in 2016.
If the MS Dept of Education under Dr. Carey Wright were a college football program, I think you’d be hearing terms like “lack of institutional control” being thrown around.
Magnolia Tribune
