The following dispatch comes from our AJC colleague Jeremy Redmon, who was with Democrat Jason Carter today during his address to a PTA conference:
Jason Carter's campaign for governor has long centered on boosting public school funding in Georgia. But at a Georgia PTA conference in Atlanta Thursday he suggested some school systems could do more with less.
The Democrat, who is challenging Gov. Nathan Deal in November, didn't identify which schools he would target for budget cuts. But he said that state government has woefully underfunded public education in Georgia and put pressure on school districts large and small.
"I do believe that adding money to the system is not necessarily going to solve every problem,” he said, responding to a question from the audience of dozens. “And I do believe in many school districts -- especially the largest ones -- you can do a lot to reduce waste, to make it more efficient, to use technology as a way to reduce costs and to improve effectiveness."
He added:
"And especially the school districts that are burdened by this giant bureaucracy ... One of the biggest retention problems with our teaching workforce is a lot of them have to deal with so much red tape that it just gets in the way of teaching. So if you can reduce a lot of that overhead and if you can reward those districts that are flattening out their systems and pushing resources into the schools, that would allow us to do more with less. And really what we would want to do is allocate the resources in a more effective and efficient way."
Carter wouldn't spotlight the school systems he thought needed to be cut.
“Before we have that discussion with local boards, the state government has to be doing its job with respect to how it allocates money. Right now, it is not and it is passing the buck to the locals to make the tough decisions. And then the locals get to point the finger back at the state for not doing its job."
Deal spokesman Brian Robison said Carter is running on an education platform “without any concrete policy or any concrete examples of how he would pay for it."
“He keeps using shell games,” Robinson said. “The biggest shell game is his campaign.”
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