Local: Cops want good schools just like everyone else
Posted in Local with tags District 150, Peoria, Police, residency on October 11, 2008 by Billy DennisC.J. has already posted about a report 1 in 4 city employees don’t live in the city. There’s already been a ton of comments.
I’ve posted about this topic before (here , here and here, among other times).
This issue drives me insane. Does the city have NO say in this matter? The way its been explained to me is that in exchange for police officers giving up the right to strike, the city has agreed to binding arbitration. And arbitrators say the city has no right to make residency an employment requirement.
I love police officers. In fact, I love them so much I want them to live next door to me. I grew up in the East Bluff where one cop who lived across the street and another who lived just down the block. Knuckleheads soon learned that anti-social behavior drew a quick and decisive response. Most chose the path of least resistance and took their stupidity elsewhere.
Of course, the son of one of these cops ended up in more than one fight with some knucklehead who took exception with his dad’s occupation.
But the thing that’s been explained to me more than once is that the main reason police officers don’t want to live in Peoria is that they do NOT want to send their kids to District 150 Schools. Can you blame them, considering that we often get school officials who side with the gun toting lawbreakers?
It’s like we’re living in a loop. Police officers don’t want to live here because of the schools. Crime gets worse because the cops don’t live here anymore. People get frightened by crime and move to the suburbs. Schools get worse because there’s no tax base. And even more cops fly to the burbs with everyone else.
I have the feeling that is we took a firehose and flushed out the criminals and their supporters from the schools, we’d see more police officers move back. Hell, we’d see a lot of law-abiding middle-class people moving back, and bringing their school-supporting tax dollars with them.
But as long as the City of Peoria has no control whatsoever over the quality of schools, we’re kidding ourselves if we expect the City of Peoria to fix the problems affecting the city of Peoria. The entity known as the Peoria School District Board of Education needs to fix these problems, but all they can come up with is that they need to build new buildings and cut the amount of time teachers have to teach.
Maybe a city takeover of the schools will become an issue in the upcoming elections. Here’s hoping.
Until that happens, I’d to see someone (*cough* state legislature *cough*) reign in the ability of arbitrators to set city policy. There is nothing unreasonable about a city making residency a requirement for employment. But I don’t see a Democrat-controlled legislature actually doing anything about it.
