OUR PLACE

Lake Geneva returns to the good sense of once again appointing a finance committee.
Was it reading about what’s going on in the school districts and their complete disregard for public financial disclosure in this newspaper (since the Regional News is unfortunately and tragically not even a shadow of its former self)? Or was it Mr. Hoiland on the city council? He favored this return to the old days of the ‘Wild West’ of financial management and public revelation of such data?

The man himself is an enigma and very difficult to predict. He’s not a fan of the GSR, although the GSR is occasionally a fan of his. He wanted a city councilperson to once again sit on the Police and Fire Commission but was voted down. (The GSR wrote that such a person would attend secret or confidential closed sessions, and the GSR was blatantly wrong, so we take that back, which means the GSR might have recommended it instead of going against the concept and implementation.)

The GSR is not always right and can be very regretful when wrong, as it is in this issue.

They have at least an undergraduate degree and additional advanced education to be certified.
The base salary for a starting police officer in Lake Geneva, without necessarily having a degree, is $ 32.00 per hour, and the GSR feels those officers are worth it. But why is the average salary of a Lake Geneva School District teacher $17.57 per hour (those figures according to Google A.I.)?

Is it any wonder that 21 of the teachers quit last year? This story deserves to be covered over and over again until the community ‘arises from its torpid state’ and takes some action to right this wrong (and not lower police salaries!). The hell with more assistants to leaders who are not really doing that much work anyway. The hell with six-figure salaries for seven employees of the city government. Jobs that can be had without a college diploma and certainly not with the additional graduate school requirement of getting a teaching certificate.