Richard,

Happy New Year to you! I do have a unique living situation. My mailing address is Eudora which is a city in Douglas County but my house is in Johnson County. However, in 2008 I paid property taxes in: Jefferson, Douglas, Johnson, Seward, Rooks, and Graham Counties but I only got to vote NO on the bond issue to build more facilities in the Mill Valley school district in Johnson County.

Like you I hate tenure. I advocate the vouchering system or some sort of privatized education system where teachers and administrators are held to a fiscal responsibility beyond "spending within their budget."

I agree with you that the good educators are underpaid in our present system. The problem is they have little or no way to be performance based evaluated and rewarded. We should employ the GE method of cleansing the bottom 10% annually to bring in new teachers and administrators. This would bring greater focus on doing a good job and investing in our youth. (This is not to say that there are not some who don't already. We all know that there are some excellent coaches and teachers who pour their life into their work without being properly rewarded for it. The problem is that for every one of those there are a handful that just put in the time they have to and collect their pay.)

I have less of a problem paying property taxes as an absentee landowner than the locals have with those of us who own land and don't live there. That is an issue I don't understand. Why would they get upset that we buy land, employ locals to farm it, visit there and spend money while hunting it, pay our property taxes while we use little or none of the services the property taxes are paying for. That seems like a great deal to me!

The biggest problem I have with the whole education system, their little control mechanism called KSHSAA, is the inablity to keep pace with the changing times. It takes FOREVER to make a change. In the business world if you have a failing entity you figure out how to change it or close it as fast as possible but in the education world you keep throwing good money after bad with no accountability. You take advantage of the emotions and keep doors open that should have long ago been shuttered. Closing a factory is just as ugly as closing a school but it has to happen. We are all living in the real world but some just don't open their eyes to see it.