I’ve got some questions

Good news! Well, at least I think it’s good news. When my son Nathaniel read my column last week, he did not tear my head off for referring to him as “my baby.” He did accuse me of being a “sentimental old fluff,” but I figure I got off light.
This week, I would like to shift gears entirely and pose a few questions. These are what I consider to be legitimate inquiries to which I do not have the answers. If you do, gentle readers, I would be ever so grateful if you would enlighten me. My questions were engendered by reading the text of our one and only governor’s education reform plan as presented in his state of the state address last week.
When are any of the people, who are serious about education reform in this state, going to understand that bigger isn’t necessarily better? The whole focus of the most successful education reform programs has been reducing the student teacher ratio. Decreasing the number of classrooms by closing and consolidating schools might save some money, but you know as well as I do that the only real savings will come by reducing the number of teacher salaries. In other words, eliminating teacher jobs. Do that and up goes the student teacher ratio. We’ll have 60 students in a classroom again before you know it. Doing with a few less superintendents and principals isn’t going to save the kind of money this whole thing will need. And, heaven knows, there are a few we could do without no matter what they’re getting paid.
By the way, has anybody looked at what it will cost to transport those kids from where they are to where the state wants them to go to school? This will make bussing to achieve racial integration look like a walk in the park, cost-wise.
The political boundaries of Prairie County include all or parts of six different school districts. None of them has facilities big enough to accommodate all those kids, except, maybe, Beebe, and I don’t think sending kids from southern Prairie County to high school in Beebe is going to fly, politically speaking. So either we’re going to have to abandon a lot of existing school facilities and build a bunch of new, centrally located ones (oh yeah, I can see that happening), or we’re going to have to do more than consolidate school districts. We’re going to have to erase all the district lines and totally redraw them, and as any state legislator can tell you, when you start redrawing things like that, somebody gets screwed.
Do you think folks in Little Rock or Northwest Arkansas are going to have their kids lives disrupted by anything the right reverend Governor Mike proposes? No, me neither. And neighbor, you can bet your false teeth that there will be a heavy political element in the redrawing of school districts.
Let’s do the math. Prairie County has a very low population density, so we have very few votes. That means very little political power. Also, we have a freshman state senator, no matter how long he served in the state house, and a freshman state representative. Political clout comes with seniority.
If the Guv gets his way, anybody want to guess who is going to be among the first to have their schools closed and their kids made a part of a social engineering experiment?