This week on "Wingin' It Wednesday", panelist Mike Stagg, Raymond 'Lala' LaLonde' (in for Warren Caudle), and Carol Ross joined "Nathan and Bernie in the Morning" to discuss problems at the Veterans Affairs Department as well as the Lafayette Parish School Board's $16 million budget shortfall.

Here's what the panel had to say:

1. White House spokesman Jay Carney is asking for patience until a full review of the Veterans Affairs Department is finished.  Pressed about reports concerning growing problems at VA health clinics, Carney said yesterday that the White House will assess the facts once the review is completed. Your thoughts?

Mike Stagg started us off:

No doubt there are problems, but I think the problem Senator Vitter and others on the right are going to have is having cried wolf on all these existential problems over the years, if there are in fact problems who is going to believe them? Veterans have been political footballs for the past two years. Whatever the situation turns out to be there’s a lot of blame to go around.

Raymond 'Lala' LaLonde posited:

They do need some more time and since Benghazi they found out flat out lying doesn’t work. I’m a patient of the VA and I’ve found that in our clinic the services have deteriorated and trying to get a phone call through goes without a response. They have some serious problems and certainly in any corporation the fault goes with the administrator. If you can’t police your agency then you need to be replaced.

Carol Ross said:

Jay Carney is asking for patience? Really? With all that veterans have had to go through?The President in 2009 said they were aware of the problems and they would get to the bottom of them. Nothing has been done. The only thing they did was increase the funding, but there was no oversight.
If you want to know what the future of Obamacare is, look at the VA.

 

Wingin It Wednesday; KPEL 96.5

2. The Lafayette Parish School Board will meet this afternoon to decide how to address a 16-million-dollar budget shortfall.  Options under consideration include dipping into the "rainy day" fund and the 2002 sales tax fund or making personnel cuts.  Both versions would cut per-pupil allocations by 25 percent. Your thoughts?

Carol started us off:

Let’s first talk about how many non-teachers have been added to the school system in the last 3 years. It’s pretty amazing the number we’re talking about. This school system has a lot of money. How are they spending it? That’s the question that has to be asked. When you talk about numbers like this, you’ve got a lot of ways to cut without getting into the classroom directly. How bout starting at the central office with “paraprofessionals”.

Lala posited:

I think the whole school system has gotten so bureaucratic that it’s gotten unwieldily.  I’m strongly in favor of creating independent school districts throughout the state, and we can start in Lafayette Parish. When you have an ISD, you have more local involvement. Independent school districts would get local funding and local participation.

Mike concluded:

The school system has had an IT Director for the last decade, and if you can’t figure out how to eliminate bureaucracy through using IT… there are ways to streamline this system without eliminating anything in the classroom.
Teachers are demoralized, they feel pushed and pulled both ways. What we have is system that doesn’t have enough advocates to point out what’s right and build on that.

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Now it’s your turn to tell us what you think about today’s Wingin’ It Wednesday topics. Who got it right, who got it wrong, and who was way off? Let us know in the comment section.

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