You've Been Surplussed

The other day I was in church when I learned a new term. During the prayer time, one of our members, a teacher here in Las Vegas, shared that she had been surplussed. Not having any idea what that meant, I turned to my wife, who generally is much smarter understanding these things and she explained that surplussed is the nice way to say we got too many teachers. But the problem in Las Vegas isn't that we have too many teachers, it's that there is no money in the system to pay them. So instead of just saying we are laying teachers off, a politically risky move, we now just surplus them. You know, categorize them as extra. Like too many ball bearings at an axle factory. The problem is, we are not talking about a commodity here. We are talking about real people. People who just a few years ago we were convinced we needed to educate the children of the Las Vegas Valley. Is that not true now, or were we wrong then? In a state woefully short on quality education in good times, imagine what havoc this will wreak on our education system now. Las Vegas regularly ranks at, or near the bottom of the pack in almost every educational marker, including per pupil spending. Yet while the truth of that sets in, our politicians seem intent on closing a budget short fall they themselves helped create, not with a mix of spending cuts and revenue increases, but solely by cutting spending. As anyone who has ever grappled with a tight budget at home knows, seldom can you make all the ends meet by just tightening the belt. There comes the time when the stay at home mom or dad must get a job, or perhaps a second job, to bring more money into the pot. There is always a point at which you cannot cut budgeted spending any more and expect to move forward. You must consider ways to raise additional revenue. If we are at a time when teachers are told the state can no longer afford to have them educating our children, and that they are little more than surplus, perhaps that time has come in Las Vegas.