Not much educatin' goin on and it ain't cheap!---Imagine if those schools made Boeing airliners.......Seattle schools spend nearly $1 million on travel as parents donate to retain teachers

Seattle schools spend nearly $1 million on travel as parents donate to retain teachers | EAGnews.org: "SEATTLE – In October, administrators of Seattle Public Schools announced that 25 teachers across the district were being transferred – a month into the school year – because district enrollment projections had fallen woefully short.
Parents reacted with outrage.
One father was moved to make an unplanned $77,000 donation to Seattle’s Alki Elementary to help that school save teachers from transfer, according to the Seattle Times.
And that father did not even have children at that particular school.
It was the second year in a row that many students suddenly had their teachers snatched away, just when they were getting accustomed to learning from them.
Last fall, the staff at Gateway Elementary staged a last-minute fundraising campaign that brought in $66,000 – enough to maintain a teacher who was about to be transferred by the district, according to a report from WestSeattleTimes.com.
District officials argued that they lacked the funds to leave the teachers in the classrooms where they were already teaching, and hire a few more to fill holes in schools with shortages.
But as Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat recently noted, the district increased its central staff budget by 16 percent this year, and the superintendent’s office budget by 16.4 percent.
So perhaps there was some money available after all, but it was spent in the wrong places.
“Every year there’s some management blunder that’s so dumbfounding that we parents, admittedly, start to go a little crazy,” Westneat wrote in a recent column.
Those parents might really get mad if they learned how much district administrators are compensated every year.
In the 2014-15 fiscal year, an astonishing total of 275 employees, mostly administrators, made at least $100,000 in straight salary.
They were paid a combined $31.9 million.
It gets worse.
A grand total of 312 employees – again, mostly administrators – made at least $100,000 in salary plus benefits, costing the district a grand total of $38.7 million.
Then there was the district’s 2014-15 travel budget. Seattle Public Schools had 85 different transactions with an agency called Travel Leaders, which was paid a total of $848,406 in taxpayer dollars.
There were also a few more trips, not booked through the agency, that totaled $76,375.
That means the district spent nearly $1 million on travel in 2014-15.
And for what?
According to the district’s report card from the state, Seattle Public Schools as a whole failed to meet annual yearly progress goals.
In fact, every group of students in every racial and socio-economic demographic failed to meet progress goals, in elementary, middle school and high school.
So there’s a lot of spending going on at Seattle Public schools, but not a lot to show for it.
“The way the district does business is insane,” Chandra Hampson, the PTA president from a district schools, was quoted as saying by Westneat.
A lot of readers probably shook their heads in agreement when they read that remark."