"I'm going to quit and go work at the Dollar Store."

Apparently, that's a catch-phrase Clay County teachers have been using when expressing their frustration and, I've learned from a few of them lately, it's being heard in teachers lounges more and more often. Why? What would frustrate someone so much that they'd scream: "I'm going to quit and go work at the Dollar Store?"

Because common sense has been overwhelmed by government's underwhelming attempt to justify its own performance. Yep, common sense has been removed from the educational system as surely as if it were a framed printing of The Ten Commandments.

The chase for federal and state education dollars has turned our classroom teachers from educators into just another inefficient layer of bureaucracy. Public school teachers now waste an inordinate amount time, energy, talent and inevitably tax dollars (that could be spent actually educating our children) filling out paperwork to prove what they're teaching. Want more Clay County kids to read at their actual grade level? Then take the paperwork-processing duties out of the teachers' job description and let them do what they were trained to do.

Let bureaucrats be bureaucrats - and let teachers be teachers.

According to the teachers I've talked to lately while gathering petitions to allow me on the ballot for the Republican primary in next year's County Commission race, there is talk among them that what they have to do as part of the new level of bureaucracy isn't what they attended four years of college to do. It isn't teaching, and that's frustrating them.

If we don't return common sense to our educational system, and let teachers begin being full-time teachers again instead of clerks, all we're going to end up with in Clay County is more and more schools filled with less and less qualified teachers in classrooms full of students who aren't getting near the education they should be receiving.

And some pretty bright, energetic, caring and dedicated new employees at The Dollar Store.

Michael S. Mann