To the editor:

Should our teachers have to pay for school supplies out of their own pockets without reimbursement? State Sen. Bill Bunten says, “If someone needs additional supplies and needs to spend their personal resources to purchase them, then let it be a high-salaried administrator rather than a school teacher.”

We subsidize the road-building industry, nuclear power, Boeing, defense, new housing as taxpayers pick up the tab for maintaining infrastructure and Republican legislators who mismanage our state budget and created this mess. We get a better bang for our buck from teachers. You can see and talk to teachers as well as solve problems together.

When Republican leadership realized new revenue was not showing on the books some years back, tax cuts were allowed to remain. So what apparently was their position? Republican leadership controls Washington, D.C., and Kansas; public schools are suffering.

Pork-barrel highway projects or educators? Bring up the subject of better pay for teachers who spend a great deal of time developing productive people out of our children and you’d think the world is coming to an end.

The Republican leadership keeps saying it will deal with this matter in 2005. You cannot believe the Republican leadership and its followers. They say they do not want to raise taxes in an election year. What difference should that make? Which is preferable: politics or education?

Richard Heckler,

Lawrence