My beloved wife will be nearing retirement age in the next few years and so I must act. Since she has devoted her life to teaching in public schools, once she does retire, the State of Arizona will present her with a $25 gift card to Walmart and a bus ticket to any other state where she would have been respected enough for what she was doing for society to have been paid a decent amount of money. So it becomes incumbent upon me to make a considerable chunk of money so that she can retire in comfort and live out her Golden Years in Italy and Spain and France and Ireland and Sedona and on the beach in San Diego and mostly in Tucson, except not in August.
I would like to make a lot of money in a short period of time without much effort. Since printing one's own money is STILL illegal (even after they have allowed that Bitcoin nonsense to take root), I am left with only one other alternative. I think I'm going to have to open my own charter school.
For the past 20 years, this has proven to be even better than printing one's own money. The State of Arizona will print it for you and then will pass laws preventing itself from seeing what you do with the money. While a huge number of charter schools over the past two decades have proven to be either fly-by-night operations or long-term scams that couldn't teach a fish how to swim, there are a few that have thrived under the sweetheart rules and the Good-ol'-Boy system. I will build on their success.
First of all, it really doesn't matter who you get to teach at poverty wages or what abandoned building you put your "school" in. The most important factor is the name of your institution. It has to have those classic buzzwords that make white people get all tingly. After putting in five whole minutes thinking about it (while watching some of the NBA playoffs at the same time), I came up with Tucson Hall of Excellence, Protecting Arizona's Legacy of Excellence (THE PALE). See, this uses "Excellence" twice, kinda like the old days when there were phone books and some guy would get an edge by naming his business AAAAAAA Sewer Scoopers.
While THE PALE has a certain wink-wink quality to it that will subliminally appeal to a particular segment of society, it also sets itself up as a maximum that cannot be transcended. For example, another school cannot call itself Beyond THE PALE because that has a negative connotation. The origin of the phrase comes from Ireland where the occupying British force in Dublin built an actual barrier of wooden stakes (from the Latin word "palus") to mark their territory. People who lived inside the Pale were right and good, while those who lived Beyond the Pale were mud-people Irish.
We'll use all of the proper words in our brochure—words like "traditional" and "classical." And, of course, "Excellence."
After taking a couple weeks to come up with the entire curriculum (I'm sure that one of the "traditional" schools would be willing to sell us theirs), we'll hold our open house. I'll get somebody to paint on the wall by the entrance a joyous scene of kids at play. But it will have a special function. You know how they have that sign at amusement parks that says "You have to be taller than this to ride this ride?" We'll use the kids in the wall painting like paint swatches to make sure that the incoming kids are PALE-worthy.
And before your start screaming racism, there will be some kids with dark skin. Somebody has to represent the school in the spelling bee.
Oh yeah, there will also be somebody on the lookout to see if any of the prospective kids has a limp. I realize that the law says that we can't keep special-needs kids out, but EVERYBODY does it. Can you imagine eating into our profits by providing special instruction to certain kids?! We're not a public school (unless that designation suits our temporary needs).
I will entice parents by promising them that, unlike the people at BASIS, they won't be asked to fork over a couple grand each year to help keep the faculty members above the Food Stamp Line. And I further promise that I will not use taxpayer money that should go toward education to buy myself a $5 million condo in New York City.
As for sports, we will offer intramural soccer. As we all know, here in America, soccer is the Next Big Thing...and apparently always will be. We'll have programs for formerly home-schooled kids, promising that, after a couple years, they will be slightly less freakishly awkward than they used to be. And we'll have clubs, like a Robotics Club and a Chess Club and then later a club for Robots that play Chess.
We'll have a former broom closet re-dedicated as the Eddie Farnsworth/Doug Ducey Wing for Ethical Studies and Actually Giving a Crap About Arizona's Students.
This thing has wild appeal. There is an endless supply of parents who want to send their kids to a school where they won't have to associate with...them. It's all just so...
Excellent.
