Last week, a fellow tweep of mine posted a blog asking just what's wrong with NYC? In it, he talked about how corrupt New York was for pouring money into the new Yankees and Mets Stadium but still hadn't built anything in place of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers.
As a New Yorker, I had to ask the same thing. Not because of them not building anything new where the Towers were but I'm looking at it from the perspective of the homeless. Every morning as I get out of the Broad Street train station off the J line, before I hop on that boat to Staten [Island], I always see homeless people sleeping in the station. In Broad Street. Which is down the damn block from Wall Street. And we have homeless people sleeping on the steps because 'there isn't any money to build homes for them'.
I was just talking to a custodial worker today in my school who said that they just excessed and laid off teachers and admin staff at the other school where he worked due to recent budget cuts. For those who aren't familiar with education system lingo, 'excessed' means when they transfer someone to a different school because their current assignment can't afford to keep them. Imagine that.
We have teachers being laid off in this crazy economy meanwhile, we just spent $330,000 on that Yankees parade. That sounds bad enough but let me show you math behind this.
Average starting salary for a new NYC school teacher is $45,000. Budget cuts also affected people who applied and were accepted to NYC Teaching Fellows this year.
$330,000/$45,000 = 7.3 teachers
If we take that money spent on the Yankees parade, we could've had 7 new teachers in our school system, educating our students. Educating our future. And had money left over to have events or build school culture in some other fashion in order to keep students interested in school. I'm not going to even get started on how many schools that could've been built with the money spent on those two new stadiums.
The amount of temporary housing and schools that could've been built with that entertainment money boggles my mind. That's two issues that could've been solved at once; people lacking homes and our national drop-out crisis that went into high-definition television screen, cold seats, and expensive hot dog stands.
I love New York.
Peace and Love...
VW
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
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1 comments:
Every time I said this, someone would jump down my throat. Then I would ask, "are you going to the parade?" and they say "yea, I got nothing better to do". I said "you're unemployed aren't you? Good luck getting your money from the yankees...."
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