Tucson Unified School District Gives Raise

 

I read about TUSD giving teachers all a $500 a year raise and then noted the fact that all other district employees will get a 2.5% raise. 

Teachers make from $32,000 to $71,000 a year with an average of about $58,000 per year, which shows this is an older workforce.  $58,000 a year would yield about $1450 at 2.5% but $500 is the raise.   There are 1750 regular teachers and 760 special education teachers and the teacher raise is expected to cost about $875,000.

Certificated Administrators make from $58,000 - $107,000 and their raise at 2.5% is expected to cost about $400,000.  There are 237 administrators.     

This raise is expected to cost $1,275,000 for certificated staff, with administrators getting 31% of the certificated money while they are just 13% of the total.   

The Superintendent’s contract has a base salary of $210,000 but is pumped up by bennies to $247,000 and possibly more.   At $210,000, a 2.5% raise would generate $5,250 for the Superintendent.  If the raise is based on $247,000, it would be more.

To quote from Tucson News Now:   “TUSD officials have estimated it will take $4.4 million to implement these increases and that it will be funded by money from the Maintenance and Operations budget.”   It looks to me like this raise is mostly going to support staff.   Given their dire budgetary predictions and dropping student enrollment, can they really afford this raise without taking needed materials from classrooms, cancelling field trips, and limiting student options?

After looking over this ‘raise’, it is obviously a palliative for the teachers and a bonus for the administrators.  If TUSD is truly on the financial ropes, then this raise is only self-serving to the administrators and does not assist the students at all.  As for the teachers, they get $500, which is something in the teaching world but they are being preempted by the administrators, who are getting way more than that.  How about the lower paid workers who get way less than that?  How about a $500 raise for everybody and funnel more money into the classrooms for the use of the students and teachers? 

Preface to A New Timeline

A New Timeline   

Short Introduction

I was born and raised in Tucson Arizona USA, in the heart of El Gran Desierto that spans the present nations of the United States of America and Mexico.  Archaeological ruins abound in that area and my family enjoyed scouting out rock art and pottery strewn sites of the Hohokam and maybe Salado.  Those experiences plus weekly trips to the library where some long forgotten librarians had created a dreamland in history that allowed me to feed a lifelong interest.  I thank to this day whomever it was over there at the library who loved history and passed it on to the citizens of Tucson. 

Receiving a classical education based on Greco-Roman and Anglo thought and achievement, I was taught European and American history and a survey of world history as it was known at that time.  We had Columbus Day off and learned to recite the Columbus poem, never doubting he was the first European to visit the Americas, even though Leif Erickson remained a possibility due to the Norse lobby who maybe could smite with Thor’s Hammer. 

I will say those people who taught history were sometimes wrong about what happened and the further back in time, the greater the error, which tended to compound itself.  I am always amazed by the certainty of historical dogma, which has produced way too many strictures on the examination of knowledge and alternate theories.

I like alternatives, variables, and choices.  The more ways to interpret data, the better.  Data interpretation is not an ego exercise or an artistic exercise but is a factual exercise.  Defending one’s theory is one thing, but suppression of alternative theories is another.  Our world is in a data flux right now, and interpretive data creation is hugely important.  Everybody needs free access to all the historical data and everybody needs to refrain from crowing about other’s mistakes in order for data sharing to proceed.  New data brings new determinations.  Ego need not apply.   

I like Wikipedia and I thank them for all the data, which is so useful in the area of human genetics and so many other areas.  Please donate to their cause.   I love the internet and all the data out there.  That’s what my Timeline is, a small compendium of data as of 2014 AD, the Zodiac Ages, the Maya Long Count, the Melancovich Cycle, Historical data, impact events and climate and sea level trends through a history reaching 3,000,000 BP to the present, with emphasis on the genetic proliferation of Homo from 500,000 BP and the indicators of extremely ancient civilizations previously thought to be mythology.  Electronic publishing is wonderful, because of the opportunities to revise as new data adds to our understanding.  If incomplete data led to a fallacious conclusion, then correct it immediately.  I’m not one to defend the indefensible. 

Dating methods are crucial.  Carbon 14 is possibly not as accurate as portrayed, since factors other than deposition must be considered when judging the accuracy of C 14 dating.  Artificial nuclear explosions deposit C14 as does the sun during certain conditions.   

I also thank the astute authors and players in their TV shows like Ancient Aliens and Decoded and America Unearthed for their interesting interpretations and presentations.  Using their shows for leads, I was able to research topics I didn’t even know existed, like the Ica Stones and Father Crespi and the obvious Inca structures atop far earlier megalithic structures.  I look forward to their shows!  They could be right about aliens landing on Earth but I believe there existed in the misty past, a grand human  civilization that was destroyed at the end of the Pleistocene.  This civilization had settlements in many different parts of the world or locally developed civilizations had hooked up, like ours today.  I do believe that rising sea levels combined with a monster bolide just eliminated it, leaving only tattered remnants of humanity to recreate what they had lost, which remained in mythology and religious compilations.  I thank George Dodwell for documenting an aberration in the ecliptic that coincides with a bolide hit and the drying of the Sahara and Levant and the subsequent fall of nations.  I thank Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, who produced Uriel’s Machine, a comprehensive explanation of the meaning of megaliths and their observatories.  The work of these men contains religious musings, which does not disarm the actual data.  I just concentrate on the facts.      

Rising sea levels and bolide hits and climate change and Antarctica freezing over and now it’s melting again!  We live in flux and cataclysmic possibilities and I think it’s time we guarded our planet with early warning defense systems.  All nations should cooperate and see if we can avert being hit yet again by bolides.  The fall of some human civilizations is inexorably linked to bolide hits…..                                                           

 

Rein in the Border Patrol

$9,127,088,000 is the magic money number required by the Border Patrol for one year of service to the nation in the 2014-15 budget, according to a Border Patrol union source.  Prior figures for the United States Border Patrol show an ever escalating growth in costs, from just $262,647,000 in 1990 up to $3,466,880,000 in 2013 in statistics generated by the Border Patrol at http://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/documents/BP%20Budget%20History%201990-2013.pdf

If these statistics are correct, then the 2014 budget shows a tripling of Border Patrol costs in just one year.  Where did this money come from?  New taxes?  Siphoned from other programs?  Borrowing? 

The outrageous cost increases of the Border Patrol are also accompanied by a perceived growth in the daily jurisdictional areas near the border.  I live in Tucson and must go through Border Patrol inspections miles from the border on at least two major highways into town, and sometimes more.  At the border, I am required to show a passport in order to reinter my own country and must submit to questioning and search.  When I traveled in Texas to Big Bend on the Rio Grande, the area was thick with Border Patrol and we were stopped repeatedly, just so they could look at us, not due to any problems.  I find it hard to believe that these unaccompanied children portrayed as swarming across the Rio Grande were not seen.  Why were they not stopped and prevented, rather than allowed to cross and then apprehended? 

This leads to a crucial question nobody is asking.  Who is responsible for bringing these children to the border?  I’ve traveled extensively in Mexico and it can be difficult, particularly without resources.  Who is bringing these children to the border?  I heard of a Catholic mission located on an island off Yucatan where migrants from Central America come by boat, and then are given arranged passage through Mexico to the USA border.  Are these religious organizations responsible for this mass movement of children?  If the violence is so bad in Central America, why have we not heard about it on the news?  It’s outrageous that a religious organization that touts unlimited breeding is now moving the resultant unwanted children to another location for others to care for them. 

If Mexico let them in in the first place, they should deal with it.  They should have more pride than to allow their country to be used as a conduit for children unwanted in their homelands to be brought to the USA.  Mexico is remiss in allowing it and if the religious organizations and coyotes are smuggling people through Mexico, the Federales should arrest them.  Either that or Mexico should take these unwanted children in.

So it comes out that Border Patrol agents in New York state are getting bonuses for busting illegal immigrants, presents like Home Depot gift cards, cash, free vacations and other perks.  The article I found states that a similar program exists in Arizona.  Does the Texas sector of the Border Patrol award bonuses for apprehensions?  Is this why they are letting ‘unaccompanied’ children into the USA?  Did Border Patrol agents receive bonuses for ‘apprehending’ these children?  Are the Border Patrol agents getting bonuses and the taxpayers get to pay for the care of these unfortunate children whose parents abandoned them?   

So now Southern Arizona is graced by Border Patrol housing units that the federal government paid $600,000 each for, when comparable units cost $100,000 and the average price of homes in Ajo nearby is some $70,000.  The Border Patrol homes are around 12-15,000 square feet.  I have seen these from the outside and they look no better than the usual tract homes around Tucson, which isn’t saying much.  With the budget tripling, I wonder how much more money they will waste when they get their hands on over 9 billion dollars.  See the article at http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/12/immigration-border-agent-housing/2642491/

 

I watched Senator Flake question the Border Patrol during the recent hearing concerning the dumped immigrant children and his basic question was an excellent one:   Why isn’t the Border Patrol on the border rather than so far inland?  I think the Border Patrol honchos are interested in enlarging their jurisdiction rather than perfecting the patrol of the actual border.  Recently, right outside Tucson, the Border Patrol conducted a high speed chase that resulted in a wrecked vehicle, from which the driver broke and ran.  A Border Patrol officer shot him in the back of the head as he was running away.  This man was an unarmed USA citizen but the agent who fired said he ‘made a suspicious movement with his hand’ so he shot him.  I believe that the Border Patrol should quit usurping the jurisdictions of our local sheriffs and police departments. 

The Border Patrol should do their job on the border and I don’t see why their budget appropriation should triple.       

School Violence

 

The recent horrifying knife attacks in high schools is being covered as regular news, with none of the furor that occurs when a gun is used in an attack. 

It is interesting that acts of violence are the root cause, not the medium or the choice of execution.  It is the reasons for this outcropping of violent behavior that should be explored ad infinitum, not the choice of gun or knife or bomb or running over somebody with a car.  The press does not research the topic of violent behavior and the reasons for it and the prevention of violence.  Some of the press prefer to vilify firearms because it’s easier than really researching the causes of violent behavior in our society.    

Removing guns and knives and weapons of self-defense only reduces our society to that of the strong versus the weak, a notoriously poor position for women and children. 

So why no furor over the knife attacks?  What brand of knife was used?  How large were the knives?  Just think about all this information they left out.  Evidently there’s no detailed description of how the attackers obtained the knives and how they smuggled them into the school and how they were prevented from further attacks.  No diagrams, no maps and not much interest in the knife attacks exhibited by the press. 

So let’s examine the reasons for the violence.  Let’s talk about the small male knife wielder who apparently felt his fellow students deserved to be surprised by the horror of his knife attacks.  Why did this kid feel that way?  Take your choice:  On illegal drugs, on ‘medication’, socially shunned, physically different, not an athlete, not a member of a group, raised by siblings, raised by nobody, unrealistic expectations, in fantasy land, can’t attain ideals, a low IQ, bullied or just plain old nuts and vicious.  Why not explore all these possibilities?  Why not publicize the drugs in the bloodstreams of attackers, in order to discern a pattern, if any? 

So now a male student killed a female student who refused to go to the prom with him.  He killed her with a knife and then fled but was apprehended by police.  Nobody is asking why the prom was so important in this kid’s social setting.  Should the prom have been so important?  Other activities are not as important?  Did the male think the female was his property and when she disobeyed him, he killed her?  Was he raised in a brutal fashion that demonstrated that females had to be dominated or you were not a man?  Him showing up at the prom with this girl was more important than anything?  What does this say about values?  The prom should not have been that important.  Was his being with this girl bringing him into a social group he craved?  Prison has social groups.  So do high schools and the adults who run the schools often encourage the social stratification, which so often leads to violence due to the exclusion of ‘less desirable’ students from the mainstream activities.   But nobody in the press explores the ‘traditional’ high school culture that has spawned awful outbursts of violence.

Many teachers are self-avowed liberals, union members and others who want to preserve the status quo, without regard to the mounting seriousness of violence, blaming the availability of weapons instead.  With this misguided focus, the problem of violence in the schools will continue growing and the social issues of the high schools will not be addressed.