With the hearings going on inside the auditorium last week, RSR spent some time talking to Kansas Citizens for Science activists at their booth outside. One prime topic of conversation was the cost of the hearings, then estimated at around $5,000.
KCFS President Harry McDonald wondered how may field trips Kansas school children could have gone on for that amount of money.
Now, the Associated Press reports that the state actually expects to spend about $17,350 on the hearings, including $5,000 to pay lodging and other expenses for Calvert's witnesses and $5,000 to have the hearings transcribed by a court reporter, plus costs for computer and electronic equipment and security, including a walk-through metal detector.
The $17,350 the state expects to spend, according to AP, would have covered state aid for 4.5 children for the current school year, or about 45 percent of the average teacher salary of $38,800.
Pedro Irigonegaray, a high-profile Kansas attorney who represented the pro-science community at the hearings refused to accept even a penny of compensation from Kansas taxpayers.
Hmmm . . . over $17K for this.
ReplyDeleteHere it is allergy season, my students are sniffling, yet our district can't afford to buy tissues for them.
At $0.85 per box, that's 20K boxes . . .
Not to mention the $35 I've spent out-of-pocket this week for classroom supplies (glue & exacto knives).
Instead, *we're* paying for this Discovery Institute infomercial.
Grrrrrrr.
csa
I think these hearings are quite ludicrous, but anybody who thinks 17K is a large amount of money hasn't spent much time working with beaurocratic processes. If you arranged a small meeting between minor elected officials from different states, with overnight stays and a few trays of sandwiches, I would expect to chew through similar thousands of dollars. Regardless of the ill-conceived nature of these hearings, it's something a lot of people wanted to see happen and the costs are very small compared to school budgets. I imagine that the hidden costs of the opposition to evolution is huge, and I happen to think that any high profile clash is a step towards the resolution of the issue, which will ultimately be the same resolution seen with geocentrism: eventual acceptance that the religiously motivated science is inferior.
ReplyDeleteYou're right - $17K isn't a huge amount of money in a bureaucracy.
ReplyDeleteYet, we've twice as many teachers/students as 20 years ago in our department, but our $2500 departmental budget is 1/4 what it was 20 years ago. Our chair is a genius at doing her best to get what we need, but even she can't make a silk purse of the sow's ear. Especially without the sow.
So while $17K may not seem like much in the grand scheme of things, it would make a huge difference in my department.
Meanwhile, I'll keep "liberating" rolls of that sandpaper AKA TP for our classroom supply of kleenexes.
csa