Spero Consulting

Last night, we attended our first pub­lic school open house. Ick! It is still dif­fi­cult to con­cep­tu­al­ize and write such a notion, but our near­est Catholic high school failed the old­est princess and us. 

We’ll have more to say on that fail­ure, but we’re strug­gling with whether to char­ac­ter­ize the prin­ci­pal as inept, inert, or lethar­gic (or some com­bi­na­tion thereof), and won’t say more until we have sorted it out. We will con­tinue to assert that there is no bet­ter place to observe the fallen nature of man than Catholic-​school sports.

Back to the pub­lic school open house: it was one of those affairs where the par­ents fol­low their child’s sched­ule for a day – with seven minute peri­ods, includ­ing lunch. The teach­ers all seemed like ded­i­cated, enthu­si­as­tic instruc­tors; so, we were encouraged.

The inter­est­ing part was that dur­ing the lunch period, we learned from a cafe­te­ria worker that a slice of pizza costs $1.75, but a pizza meal, includ­ing drink and side dish, costs $1.65, or ten cents less.

You see, the gov­ern­ment sub­si­dizes entire meals but not slices. So, finan­cially, it makes sense to buy the meal and throw-​away the drink and side dish. Of course, all of this, includ­ing the subsidization, occurs in one of the wealthy school dis­tricts in the state.

So, does the dear reader think nation­al­iz­ing our finan­cial firms will end well? Gives new mean­ing to the expres­sion “less is more.”