School or Prison? You choose

Read the letter here!

        The link to the article above will take you to a letter written by a Michigan Schools Superintendant, Nathan Bootz,  to the Governor that was posted on the bigthink.com website. First off, bigthink.com is an awesome website that has articles and blog posts from “The World’s Top Thinkers and Leaders” that addresses current events and opinionated topics.  Anywhoo, this letter that was written by the Superintendent was sarcastically toned with the premise of ‘Please make my school a prison’. I strongly recommend that if you really want to take anything away from this post that you read the letter AND some of the comments that are listed below it.

The Superintendent addressed the enormous discrepancy between funding for schools and prisons in the state of Michigan. The article sites that on average, the state spends about $7,000 annually per student and $30,000-$40,000 annually per prisoner. Bootz states,   “Consider the life of a Michigan prisoner. They get three square meals a day. Access to free health care. Internet. Cable television. Access to a library. A weight room. Computer lab. They can earn a degree. A roof over their heads. Clothing. Everything we just listed we DO NOT provide to our school children.” He goes on to argue that he believes there is a direct relationship between Michigan’s lack of funding for schools and the extremely high prison enrollment. This really is an extremely discouraging fact, but one person who commented on the article made a great point:  Why when we know that the national debt is extremely high do we continue to ask for more? We obviously know that if we are in a financial crisis we can’t really just say, “Ok, let’s find them these resources too” and pump more money into the already failing systems.  Now, I don’t really believe that Superintendent Bootz’s purpose of the letter was to try to find equality in funding between the school and prison systems, I think he got the true message across to the Governor and the readers who saw it. There are serious fundamental problems with the way our state and federal systems are set up and there needs to be change, soon. The way I see it, there is too much focus on the right now and not enough focus on the future. Some people may say, “Well the prisons and prison systems generate money and jobs”. Yea, well so do schools. If we truly believe that the money and security that prisons generate is really worth 5-6 times more than what educating our future is worth, we really are screwed.