Weblog
04/22/01 11:35 AM: I wrote another letter to
I wrote another letter to the editor today (My, aren’t I feeling bold!). My school district is way short on funds (despite the recently departed superintendent and the also recently departed assistant superintendent both giving themselves hefty pay raises). There was an opinion piece in today’s paper by a former school board member urging residents to vote against a proposed budget that would increase taxes by around ten percent. Education costs naturally rise as the years go by, as does the cost of everything else. Most districts account for this by small tax increases every now and then. People grumble, but they go along with it. But my district has chosen to simply do nothing to deal with these rising costs as of late, and it just hit the fan. Fourty-three people have been laid off, and 21 more will get the axe to squeeze by on the new budget. And this guy still thinks it is too much money!!! Hello? Rationality? There’s a lot of static. . . . The line just went dead. Anyway,
To the editor:
In nearly every discussion of the Auburn schools’ budget crisis, the issue of declining enrollment comes up. As a current junior at Auburn High School, I can’t say what conditions were like ten or twenty years ago. What I do know is that the size of my classes has been increasing.
Two years ago, I had a Global Studies class with only eight students. That was probably some sort of fluke, but the rest of my classes were relatively small as well. Last year, my largest class had maybe 23 students, the rest being in the teens. My smallest class this year is comparable to last year’s largest class.
The high school’s two large amphitheater-type rooms are currently used only for study halls. I’d like to see it stay that way instead of having the high school become like a university where graduate students (as opposed to actual teachers, the professors) lecture to rooms packed with hundreds of students.
To those who would crow about the tax increase (which, by the way, is needed to fund a budget that still terminates an additional 21 staff members, including 19 teachers): the fact that Auburn has been stricken with a severe case of myopia in the recent past with regards to the (naturally) increasing cost of education and has neglected to periodically vote for small tax increases to cover those rising costs is no reason to deny today’s students an adequate education.
If the school district continues down this road of cutbacks, pretty soon no teachers are going to be left to teach my generation the basic economics that we might later employ to avoid running into a mess such as this.
