Agreed on the outrageous part, though!
After all, most people grow old, retire, and become dependent on the young workers in the economy to carry the tax burden, defend the nation, serve as doctors, nurses, caretakers, and so on.
It takes a village to raise a child, but it also takes children to have a village at all. So I don’t think it’s crazy if we spread the cost of education not just among parents but across the whole population.
The better we educate these little people the better the future will be. Letting people take this money that we set aside to invest in the future seems unwise.
It's been messy to watch this play out in Portland, the quality of education delivered is not consistent and each charter school (or chain) is on its own to reinvent the wheel (and waste resources doing so) on common infrastructure many districts would otherwise share.
They were non-existent.
The reality, in NJ at least, is that a school’s budget will balloon to the maximum size legally allowed, and expand from there forever. On occasions when stupid BOE’s back themselves into a corner, they rook the residents into a referendum to get a zillion dollar bond.
The common theme in public schools is: mandatory funding via taxation, and no accountability at all.
The cost to do this for an individual school is much greater than spreading these primarily fixed over many schools.
I have looked at our budgets, IT is almost a rounding error out of the $25 million/year.
Most of the “synergy” of combining schools is supposed to come out of reduced administrative personnel.
Except that never happen. Quite the opposite - administration swells and the combined regional district ends up costing more.