Well, not really. In fact this should shame everyone who reads it as it’s voters who allow this to continue by electing the worst of the worst to public office.
Included in a report on schools facing layoffs and even closure from Bryce Covert of ThinkProgress is this from the elementary school district of Harlem.
The Harlem Elementary School District didn’t rehire for some positions and asked 100 employees to cut $100 from their operational budgets to deal with a 47 percent cut to the budget this year. It also canceled Kindergarten for a day, but one five-year-old still came to school because he was hungry and needed his state-subsidized breakfast. Next year it will have to dip into reserves or hold fundraisers. After that it will have to cut staff, go over the state class size limit, and look at closing schools.
Small children going to school on a day that it’s closed because they have nothing to eat isn’t what I typically think of when I think of America, but maybe it should be. Maybe we aren’t appropriately cognizant of this.
Then again, how could we be? The Fourth Estate is more concerned about phantom blue dresses and witch hunts than the boy who had nothing to eat or a school to attend.
As far as the beltway press is concerned, the time of economic hardship is over and the return of scandal is proof of this. Never mind that most of them are quite wealthy themselves which means they have nothing to distract them from what really matters — their own careers.