This is happening all over Wisconsin. I saw a post about Port Washington schools having the same problem.
This is a recent board deck from the West Bend School District (thanks to the local resident who sent it to me). They hired 60… SIXTY… people with “free” federal Covid slush fund money. This is a district that has had declining enrollment for the better part of a decade and is projected to continue to have declining enrollment for another decade.
And yet, when someone came around with free money, they found a way to spend it by padding their staff with useless (I say “useless” intentionally) staff. How many of those staff members are friends of family of existing staff members? How many are doing jobs that have absolutely zero impact on student performance? The decision to hire these people was a terrible decision and a complete waste of money. How can I tell? The West Bend School District’s student performance has not improved. That is the #1, #2, and #3 goals of a school district – to educate kids. If adding these people did not positively impact educational outcomes, then it was a waste of money.
Now that money is finally going away and school districts all over Wisconsin – bolstered by the bleating of Governor Evers – are whining and crying about “cuts.”
Get bent.
They never should have wasted that money in the first place and the fact that these people should now all be fired is 100% the responsibility of the idiots who made the decision to hire them in the first place. The vast majority of Wisconsin’s school districts are terribly run and should not be rewarded for their mismanagement.
Speaking of whining …
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently canceled more than $12 million in grants scheduled to go to the University of Wisconsin–Madison due to concerns that the funding would go to projects related to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI).
According to a federal lawsuit filed on April 4 by Wisconsin and 15 other states, around a third of UW-Madison’s annual research budget is supplied by the NIH. “In fiscal year 2024, UW-Madison received direct funding from NIH to support 588 projects, totaling more than $404 million,” the lawsuit explains.
That “third” is a lie and the $404 million is obviously and purposely misrepresents only half of a fiscal year.
This is what UW spent (billions), by fiscal year….
_2021__2022___2023__
1,380 1,524 1,732 (+25.57 %)
Here’s how much Fed money (millions) they got….
___2021______2022_____2023__
646,764 740,854 816,814 (+26.3 %)
Those numbers were released on Nov. 25, 2024.
In two years UW-Mad got a Fed increase of $170 million.
And they are whining about $12 million.