Earlier I posted about a redevelopment area in China, a communist country that managed to work around a single property owner, and provided a picture. To be fair this is not an unusual development throughout the world, another picture showed a highway diverting around a farm in England. These striking examples show that no matter what the development effort, property owners have a right to retain control of their property. Even in Washington DC, a recent building was put up around a single house.

[Read more →]

It wasn’t too long ago that gambling and education was tied together when the Connecticut legislature said lottery proceeds would go the Education. But over the years an interesting thing happened, the money towards education seems to have been forgottne. It’s not hard to see why. Here’s a link to the State Web Site report on the percentage of revenue now generated to the State from lottery sales. Remember it wasn’t that long ago that the lottery agency was outsourced to a private company, in 1996. Since then the total pay-out to the state has dropped from near 40% to its current near 30%. Yet it looks like gross sales about doubled. Why is this?

[Read more →]

It doesn’t take long for latent memories of long ago lectures to resurface in a post traumatic stress disorder kind of way. Listening to Sal Corda skirt around any issue in a verbal fox trot triggered a Manchurian candidate programming response. Key word: Instructional Specialist. When I hear that term, I want to duck roll and cover, because the BS is about to be piled on thick.

So, where to begin in this tale of a three hour budget q & a? Firstly, the elected part of the Board of Ed was there! Perhaps they were there in support of Corda, but maybe, just maybe they were there to figure out why all these questions were being raised. One has to dream after all.

[Read more →]