Towns with amusement parks and their financial woes.

I dont know what the problems may be in Ohio, but every level of government can ALWAYS find ways to cut spending if they need too, but choose not to do so. Unless of course the voters force them too which is why i vote against EVERY school levy(or any tax levy on a ballot)that is on a ballot. The sad thing is that once they are voted down they just come back several months later and eventually they pass.
As for teachers, with the time off they have and the generous pension plans/healthcare they have they are very well compensated. I might feel different if US students were the best in the world, but sadly we are nowhere close, thought this cant be blamed entirely on the teachers.
For some reason people think just throwing money at schools will solve problems, but that has never been shown to be the case. I send my kids to religious schools(where morality is even taught which will never be found in a public school)and they spend far less per pupil and when testing is done the students acheive far more than there public school counterparts. If schools got rid of all the bureaucrats that have little to do with teaching there would be more than enough money for the schools and money left over to return to the overburdened taxpayers!!!

Well, Bob, that's just not the case for schools in Ohio. The funding system is seriously screwed up here, to the extent that our supreme court ordered it unconstitutional. There's nothing more to cut here unless you plan to keep the kids at home and home school them.

Bob: it has been shown in more than one study that test scores can be predicted almost entirely by the income distribution levels in a school district. Some subversive soul in Michigan uses changing economic data to predict MEAP scores every year, and comes amusingly close to being dead on each time, without using anything *but* income as input data. So, before you congratulate yourself on your school's "efficiency", recognize that their student population is starting off ahead of the game compared to their public school counterparts because, on average, private school families have higher incomes than public school families do.

As a disclaimer, my parents took advantage of this by sending me to Catholic shools when we lived in rural Michigan, but public schools when we lived in Palo Alto (or, as I like to call it, Shallow Alto.) Furthermore, I live in the Ann Arbor school district (and pay the significant premium to do so) for a reason---the schools are better.

There have been some great papers written by prominent economists recently on the increasing geographic segregation of wealth. The gist of it is simple. People with means are willing to pay to be in school districts with "better scores." This drives up prices in neighborhoods with "good schools" and increases the income distribution, and test scores correspondingly rise. This makes those districts more attractive to people with means. And so it goes. Those schools aren't magically getting better. They're just serving increasingly-advantaged students.

One of the proposed cut here is the school bus for 10th to 12th graders for students living WITHIN half a mile (obviously excluding disabled students). Currently, students are picked up by a bus even they live across the street from schools.