If you can remember, this Great Recession, as they call it, began cascading in the seemingly remote sector of real estate lending, yet as far away as those places might seem in the headlines, these days I’ve witnessing the local impact as these shock waves finally hit home.

I’ve sat through enough board of education meetings to know there is certainly a hard reality to these hard financial times. A few lucky and disconnected people still doubt the whole economic situation as nothing more than politics.

There are these young men and women across the county who are nothing less than the victims of chronic government incompetence and unsustainable spending. Unsustainable – a word we hear a lot these days. It’s a way of saying that we need to lower our expectations of what we received from the system because the benefits we’ve been reaping for a generation are no longer practical.

Things from education to road maintenance to just about any program needing a large part of state or federal funding have an unpredictable future.

Direct victims of the recession are these teachers being turned away from our schools in order to accommodate cuts in aid. This isn’t the beginning note to a song debating the need to increase education spending; to the contrary I believe it has been over-funded, over-mandated and ill-spent.