By Victor Skinner
EAGnews.org

TOPEKA – Democrats in the Kansas legislature want the state’s taxpayers to believe public schools are running at the peak of efficiency.

They just set up a website to solicit success stories from the front lines and champion all that’s good in public schools.

MORE NEWS: Know These Before Moving From Cyprus To The UK

The Democrats’ rosy perspective, and website, is designed to counter the findings of a task force established by Gov. Sam Brownback to identify ways to eliminate waste in public schools and spend education tax dollars as efficiently as possible. The task force started a website to garner anonymous tips and comments about public school spending, and it has Democrats and their union supporters up in a tizzy.

“His website seems like nothing more than a forum to demonize educators,” Senate Minority Leader Antony Hensley told the Associated Press.

“Hensley, a Topeka Democrat, said identifying and eliminating waste in government was a good exercise. But he said the assumption shouldn’t be that the state’s 286 school districts aren’t being as efficient as they can be,” the AP reports.

Actually, research conducted by EAGnews over the past several years suggests the opposite.

We’ve reviewed hundreds of school union contracts, and every one mandates a significant amount of unnecessary spending on items like unused sick day bonuses for school employees, free or low-cost health insurance, free or low-cost retirement pensions, retirement bonuses, certification bonuses, automatic raises, special stipends for lunch duty or bus supervision, and extra pay to cover for absent colleagues, just to name a few of the most common.

All such expenses cost schools a lot of money, and none can be justified during tough economic times.

MORE NEWS: How to prepare for face-to-face classes

School districts can save substantial cash through adjustments to health insurance, contracting for nonunion labor with local food service or bus companies, and a host of other best practices despised by teachers unions and their sponsored Democrats. The teachers unions oppose efficiency measures because they often conflict with the union’s objective of maximizing the number of union employees and the amount of union dues collected.

We believe that Brownback’s task force – which is comprised of accountants and individuals with significant private sector experience – is on the right track, and should ignore objections from those who have a vested interest in maintaining a bloated public school bureaucracy.

The task force should listen to those who are suggesting efficiencies, investigate how the Kansas National Education Association – the state’s teachers union – is affecting school budgets, and take appropriate action to refocus spending on what matters most – students.

To ignore unnecessary spending and the union’s expensive influence in public schools would be an injustice that will haunt the state’s students indefinitely.