Huntsman Seminar (and Senator Jones)

The next event in my busy June was a week long conference, the Huntsman Seminar.  Before my trip to Jersey I participated in the "Creating Extraordinary Citizens" conference, and the seminar went hand in hand with it.  I'm now inspired to kindle in my students a sense of civic duty.  I enjoyed meeting local politicians and mostly feeling important. We went on a tour of the Utah State Capitol which I had never done before.

 And we even got to sit in Utah Senate (in the actual Senator's chairs!)

We were also "wined and dined" with free lunch every day.  I always get jealous when Clint's work gives him free food, takes him to the movies, etc.  Teachers don't always get a lot of free stuff.  Fortunately, this program was not publicly funded, it was privately funded by the Huntsman Center.  Woot!

I also really enjoyed the day we studied the court system.  The Scott M. Matheson Courthouse is really beautiful.  I didn't take any pictures though, so here is a lifted pic of the outside.  I wish I had some pictures of the interior rotunda as well.

There we spoke with Honorable Jill N. Parrish, Justice UTah Supreme Court.  She told us all about the Utah  legal system and why in Utah we don't vote for our judges.  I never thought about it before, but according to Judge Parrish, one study found that 46% of judges in Texas, Ohio, and Louisiana admitted that campaign contributions affect their decision-making as judges. Yikes! I also got to meet the Mayor of Salt Lake, Ralph Becker, in the Utah City and County building, (also very beautiful).

On the last day of the program, Utah Senator Pat Jones spoke to us about funding education in Utah.  This woman is a-MAZING! She definitely knows how to get all the teachers on her side!  As various politicians and CEOs spoke to us, a number of them said things that were slightly offensive or backwards.  But Senator Jones seems to have a good understanding of what teachers face and some of the absurdities of the public education system.  I'll probably have a separate post later on detailing some of these issues, but I wanted to focus here on her fascinating proposal for funding education.

In Utah, we have a funding problem with education because such children are such a high percentage of our population.  The republicans have this hair-brained idea that we will be able to claim federally owned lands within Utah and use them to generate revenue.  (It seems doubtful that the feds will let their land go.)  They also seem to think that by spurring the economy, we will have more revenue with which to fund education.  Senator Jones points out that this is a chicken and the egg debate.  Sure if we grow our economy we will have more money, but won't having a better educated work force grow our economy?

Anyway, Senator Jones pointed out that in Utah, the money for education comes from income tax.  But families can be exempted from income tax based on the number of children they have.  It doesn't really make sense to exempt people from paying a tax that funds public education when they are the very ones that are utilizing free public education. So she is proposing a bill that would cut state personal exemptions of number of household for income tax!  Now, she understands that some families with economic challenges need this exemption in order to have money to care for their children, so she has built into this proposal provisions so that families near a certain level of income can still be exempt.  But in general, this means everyone is paying into the education system, which seems like a good idea to me!