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Common Dreams reports
Colorado's teachers' union expects more than 400 teachers at a rally that's planned for Monday at the state's Capitol in Denver.
[...] Englewood School District, outside the capital city, announced on Sunday that schools would be closed the following day as 70 percent of its teachers had indicated they wouldn't be working Monday. It was unclear on Sunday whether more school districts would be closing.
"We are calling Monday, April 16th a day of action", Kerrie Dallman, president of the Colorado Education Association (CEA), told KDVR in Denver.
[...] According to[1] KMGH in Denver, "The CEA estimates that teachers spend on average $656 of their own money for school supplies for students." The state's teacher salaries rank 46th out of 50, with educators making an average of $46,000 per year.
Public schools are underfunded by $828 million this year, Dallman told the Post, and lawmakers have said they could inject at least $100 million more into schools--but they have yet to do so.
[...] The planned protest follows a trend that was seen in West Virginia and Kentucky before moving west this month to Oklahoma and Arizona as well as Colorado. In all the states where teachers have walked out and rallied at their Capitols, teachers have reported paying for school supplies out of pocket, working second and third jobs to make ends meet, and coping with funding shortages while their legislators hand out tax cuts to corporations.
[1] For a laugh (or perhaps a deep sigh), check out all the whitespace in the source code of the page.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday April 16 2018, @06:54PM (3 children)
Spoken like someone who has not experienced poverty.
Housing is just one of many expenses, and singling that out as the problem is like saying a dog bite is the problem for people who are also pursued by thousands of angry wasps and bees, and swarmed by more mosquitoes than the Everglades has, and when they dive into a pond to escape the insects, they're beset by lampreys and leeches.
The sale price is just the start of the expenses for a home. You also have property taxes, utility and energy bills, and maintenance. The city frequently harasses home owners over their lawns, parking in the street, inoperable vehicles, fences being in disrepair, and so on. The cheap homes go way cheap on appliances and fixtures, which is a maintenance nightmare. And we've been massively upsold, persuaded to use expensive methods for simple things, stuff such as an automatic garage door opener. Why, for instance, do we need bed frames? Why not just put the mattresses on the floor? The utilities get jacked up thanks to horribly inefficient equipment-- the "builder's special" AC unit, the electric furnace that uses 5 times as much electricity to heat than a heat pump would, an electric water heater instead of solar, the shower faucet that can adjust temperature but not water flow so that when it's on, it's always full blast, and so on. Don't you just love learning that the wiring and circuit breakers in your beautiful home are not up to code, might start a fire, and should be redone, at great expense of course? How about your home insurer forcing you to buy a new roof because the shingles are worn out? Why do we use those damn asphalt singles anyway, they last at most 20 years. Or you don't move soon enough on the roof, and then you find out after the next heavy rainstorm that the roof had developed a bad leak, and now you've got lots of water damage to fix. And then the foundation cracks, termites chew up the wooden frame, squirrels move into the attic and cut the wires, the sewer lines clog, the faucets start dripping when off, the kids spill soda and barf all over the carpets, and also the dog takes a crap on the carpet, etc.
America is a jungle, with financial predators everywhere. Most are opportunistic, and who better to prey upon than the weak and ignorant? Even the savviest people are suckered into spending money unnecessarily, thanks to our consumerist society relentlessly bombarding people with messages to solve your problems for the low, low price of whatever. Playing upon fear is a huge driver of sales. Better buy that extended warranty, be a real shame if your new smart TV died young or your tires failed early. They're incredibly skilled at making you think you got a deal, a great sale price, and you put one over on them, when you didn't. How about that recent admission that for Big Pharma, treatments are much more profitable than cures?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2018, @08:41PM (1 child)
Sorry, no.
First, you're assuming that people are all buying instead of renting. In many places, renting is more cost-effective than buying, especially if you aren't sure you're going to be there for 8+ years. Property taxes and maintenance costs go away when you're renting.
For lawns, parking in the street, inoperable vehicles, etc., these are only problems if you have a single-family house. People in apartments (which describes many lower-income people) don't have these problems. And there's nothing requiring you to keep inoperable vehicles around. If you can't fix it, sell it on Craigslist. It's only dumb rural people who have some kind of obsession with making their home a salvage yard. Urban poor people don't have this problem.
Automatic garage door openers are a problem in your mind? Huh? Those things are extremely reliable these days, generally. I haven't had trouble with one of those since I was a teenager. And poorer people generally don't have garages anyway.
Bed frames? Where is it required that you have a bed frame? If you don't want one, don't get one. No one's going to fine you because you don't have a bed frame. Lots of people don't. People usually like them because they like being able to sit on the bed at times, and also because older people would have trouble using a bed that's too low. And what's the problem anyway? It's a simple piece of steel. If you're having maintenance problems with a bed frame, then you have some other issues.
For the shower faucet, that's why you get a modern low-flow shower head for $10 or whatever. Shower heads are only supposed to use 2.5 gallons per minute by federal law. You can put restrictors in there as well to cut it down more if you want.
Anyway, again, most of your complaints come with owning a home. Rent a home and you can push all the problems onto your landlord. This isn't a perfect system, but renters do not have to deal with paying for leaky roofs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2018, @10:39PM
> Property taxes and maintenance costs go away when you're renting.
Property taxes and maintenance costs are baked into the rental cost, along with profit to the owner & management company (if one is involved).
FTFY
In certain markets I've heard of cheap rental prices relative to the cost to operate the unit. This might be due to rent control (NY City?) or a market where the appreciation on the property makes up for the lack of rental income.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 17 2018, @01:39PM
Southerner detected (not that there's anything wrong with that). cold air sinks and flows across the room no matter how well insulated the room, so in energy costs alone a $50 bed frame from target will pay for itself in one season, or pretty quickly up north, anyway.
Also you stash your seasonal clothes in giant tupperware buckets under the bed; if you lived in the deep south, where would you stash your three winter coats and snowpants and boots and glove collection and long sleeved shirts and sweaters during the summer? Oh yeah, probably don't own any of that stuff in the deepest south. Whats the record low temp in Miami, like 40 F?