Reason #13: Budget, Personnel, and Decision-Making Control
Have you ever really paid attention to school lunch requirements and the silliness that goes on in determining what’s offered to children? Everything’s written down to the ounces of peanut butter per year of age that must be served to children by law – it’s something like 1 ounce per year of age – can you imagine what a peanut butter and jelly sandwich would look like for a 10 year-old?!? It’s ridiculous. Plus, with limited budget for food, school cafeterias have to serve some lower quality and higher-fat foods. Even though we’ve got a limited budget here at our homeschool, we still eat decent food and the amounts of pizza sauce we believe is personally tasty on our pizza – not regulated by state law serving requirements, lol!Most concerning to me is that the state and local departments of education are limiting extra-curricular activities more and more, due to lack of funds to support them.I’ll be the decision-maker when it comes to education “budget cuts” at my school. There will be no limiting Art, Music, PE, foreign language, etc. in our school because of lack of appropriated funds. And we won’t be limited to having electives on a 6, 7, or 8-day rotation governed by limited time, overcrowded schools and over-stretched personnel, or short funds. We’ll have Art once a day if Laynie enjoys it that much. She’ll be attending karate, dance, golf, community soccer, homeschool co-op P.E. class, or whatever else she happens to be interested in for her physical education, and will be allowed more than 20-30 minutes per day (typical public school outside time) to play outside if she wants to – in fact, she’ll have lots of playtime at our local parks and playgrounds too. If “budget cuts” become necessary (because of living off one income) guess who gets to decide what’s important to “let go” or scale back on? Me!
