It's the time of year. Right now, openings posted through SchoolSpring are generally replacements for mid-year departures. Jobs begin popping up April-May, if my memory is correct.

Freedom of assembly and speech sure is expensive if you're an essential worker... :/

Galvin, along with the rest of the school committee, set the conditions for a strike by refusing to negotiate in good faith. Galvin, along with the rest of the school committee, set the conditions for the strike to last by lowballing and offering little in the way of compromise. Galvin personally set the conditions for the strike to go longer than it did by walking out of a meeting to go on TV while the union was at the table ready to keep talking.

The idea that the union's actions are responsible for $250,000 for the taxpayer is, on its face, ridiculous.

Galvin could have walked out two more times, hardballed them for four more days, and said a cool half-million ought to cover it.

Civil rights decisions, like those leading to the end of Jim Crow laws, are a justification for the Judicial Branch. Their institution is not a justification to reconstitute representative power.

Believing majority power matters in the distribution of funding doesn't make one prejudicial, and hitching rural MA to the plight of people living in the Jim Crow south is plain gross.

I'm a high school English teacher who asks students to read poetry, including the works of realists like Robert Herrick, so I'm a bit biased here. With that out of the way, I think there are a bunch of issues to dig into in this question, and I hope to just tackle a few:

1. Charisma and Agendas. Without question, Mr. Keating is a problematic teacher-figure in film. He takes a job working with children, trying to breathe life into them before they shuffle out the door, conforming to the values of their parents and the institutions that have carried them--generationally--into success. His self-appointed mission is to interrupt that process by communicating to them, Day One, that they are following their parents down a Wrong Path, and that literature is a means of switching onto the Right Path. The ethics of this are dubious.
2. Literature As Problematic. There's no shortage of people in the world right now who want nothing more than to keep literature out of the hands of children. The quality of literature is that we do not merely consume it, but that we interact with it. Poems and books can shape our thinking, and when we're vulnerable, we're vulnerable to literature, too. Realists dealt with the isolating nature of the industrial world, and it's too common to assign blame to artistic expressions of problematic circumstances rather than the problems themselves. Neil absolutely sees himself in the art because it's true. So it follows that asking teachers to shield minds from literature is equivalent to shielding them from truths like "We're all mortal," and "Do things, now."
3. Expecting the Unexpected. If I've learned anything in almost two decades of education, it's that talking to teenagers in figurative terms or moving into the philosophical discussion of the abstract means that those who are actually listening and processing what you say are very likely to apply what you say unexpectedly. Placing responsibility on Keating--or more specifically, blame--requires us to say that either (a) he should have expected this could happen, or (b) regardless of if he expected it, he owns a piece of it. I have to work with pretty subtle degrees or shades of the term "responsibility" to accept the notion that an English teacher bears responsibility for rash decisions of children who are suffering from isolation borne from familial pressures.
4. Characters as Vessels. If we consider Neil, Keating, the administrators, the parents, all the characters as fictional figures rather than real ones, it helps us see them as vessels representative of the values of the time, rather than simply as make-believe people with motivations. If we assign Keating blame, as a vessel of anti-authoritarianism, in the decision of the Self Destructive Victim of Authority character, then that's highly problematic--it establishes a theme of the story that empowerment is dangerous and the right road might just be to acquiesce to Authority and to bide time. The urgency of Keating here, not as a literal one but as a symbolic one, speaks more broadly to the need for people to develop their identity early in life as part of the formation of their character before they are swallowed by the Leviathan. The truth is, the Father figure is also in crisis: he acquiesced to his own father, and his father before him, and the institution of the school reflects the broader society that isolates people to the point they don't recognize the value of their own children or the value of education itself as anything more than a path to financial excess and placement within the machine. Fundamentally, something the American realists saw in their poetry.

The BRRRR sound of maybe hitting the rumble strips because you can't merge is loud so it's better to be rear-ended by the car behind you trying to merge, too.

Can't say how many times I've been a couple car lengths behind someone getting on the highway, turn to look at the flow of traffic and then had to slam the breaks because the car ahead stopped.

MA has a structural problem with it's failure to adopt county-level funding systems. Schools within 5 miles of each other have different tax bases and consequently grossly uneven distributions of resources (doubly so since the state has been pushing ed-funding formulas onto townships for the past decade+).

The wealthy spend a far smaller percentage of their earned income, meaning that when it comes to sales taxes, the wealthy pay a smaller percentage of their total income to the state. Reason for this? People who are middle class and working class spend a much larger percentage of their earned income on week-to-week expenditures, while the top percentage folds much of their wealth into "not taxable annually" places. This futzes with annual calculations for state revenue.

Their property taxes flows proportionately to their community, meaning the ridiculously wealthy communities get ridiculously funded schools. But the state has less funding through sales to appropriate to the poorer districts with the greater volume of low income housing and higher population densities and greater student populations with smaller net revenue to be distributed across many more schools.

We have to acknowledge that, nationally, MA is in the minority--34 states have progressive tiered tax systems that acknowledge that wealthy need to contribute a higher percentage of their wealth because so much of it can be squirreled away, untaxed or undertaxed.

I mean, a quick search reveals that BHCC has $81 million in annual expenditures. If this were a private corporation, we wouldn't blink at the idea that people are making that kind of figure. Whether private or public, all public ed schools need to be at least somewhat competitive in the job market and that means salaries and benefits.

People who are against funding education often claim to believe in the free market. I don't see why it isn't apparent that market forces work against schools, too. There's a supply and demand in the labor force, too, and frankly I don't think anyone wants someone OK with $70k/annual being in charge of that much money or the organizational structures that distribute it.

You're using the conditions of your town to justify opposition to a state-level question in a state where educational conditions are grossly disproportionate on a town by town level.

MA was a hundred years ahead of Brown vs the Board, and integrated schools in 1855 because we had redlined minority populations and used a township funding model, meaning that wealthier families on one side of the tracks got better schools than poorer families on the other side.

I bring this up because the result is that MA schools have been inequitably funded through ~170 years of disinvestment that has resulted in gross imbalances in education needs, spending levels, and outcomes from one town to another.

Your halcyon circumstance living in a community that puts too much money in schools, has tiny classes for your youngest kids, and has an aid in every classroom is an exception, is no reason to oppose the distribution of resources to towns that are overfilled, under-budgeted, and short-staffed.

And using learning outcomes as a justification for stripping money from your school system because those kids went through a pandemic like the rest of us is just plain gross.

Let me reframe what this person appears to be saying for anyone reading this far down: "I'm going to vote down a question on the ultra-rich that will provide much needed funding to the poorest schools in the state because the staff in my wealthy district has it too easy and didn't offer themselves up on a sacrificial altar, defying regional norms for schools. And, despite all indication to the contrary, I'm presuming that's everywhere so fuck'em."

Please don't take that approach to this question when you vote. If you have a fortunate situation, even if you're dissatisfied with your schools, do not take it out on every school in the state. We have schools competing for subs and the poorer districts are losing. We have schools that are pretty and new with limited behavioral concerns and, because of staffing shortages, people are leaving poorer, rougher schools to enjoy the change in cultural climate. Our schools are Swiss cheese right now, and if you aren't dealing with a hole, your neighbor is.

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As for my original "Try it" comment--which frankly has nothing to do with this unique situation-- I'm more trying to clarify that concerns that the money will simply be re-appropriated without push-back are false. There will be plenty of push-back, and the state senate will have to include in their calculation the fact that if they cook the books and are caught, they'll have a considerable, organized response to contend with.

"Try it." - Every local teacher union, the AFT, the MTA, the NEA, the MBTA, and the BCU 589.

Cue the training montage, OP!