The following is a letter to the editor that I intend to send to our local paper regarding the current school funding issues (also here). Comments and questions always welcome. (I should mention that as an anti-spamming measure, all comments have to be approved before they appear on the page, and unfortunately you’re not given any immediate feedback to that effect. Don’t worry - your comment has gone into the system and will be approved and appear shortly.)
As I teach, my working assumption is that my students will go on to do interesting and important things. While I may not always be right, any other assumption has a strong tendency to be self-fulfilling, and I’m just not willing to yield that ground.
As a member of this community and a parent of a child in MAES, my working assumption for our children is the same: They are going to go on to do interesting and important things. They need our support for that dream to come true, and frankly we need them. We need them to develop into the kinds of people that can help our community grow and thrive in an environment where rural communities continue to struggle. We need their help in managing the many challenges that we’ve yet to dream of but which will surely present themselves.
Challenging students to meet these expectations and become leaders of tomorrow is hard work. It requires more than just marking time in a classroom. It requires class sizes that allow teachers the time and space to get to know kids and tailor their educational experience. It requires a broad range of curricular and co-curricular opportunities so that students can find and develop their individual sets of skills. It requires faculty and staff who believe they have the support of their community.
We are blessed with some exceptional teachers and staff in our district who are willing to put in enormous effort and hours because they believe in the importance of our children and in their ability to make a difference. Our students need those teachers, and those teachers need our support. One nearly certain outcome of the deep budget cuts that are being proposed is a serious blow to the morale of our district’s staff, and an unsupported, dispirited staff is much less capable of challenging our children to find what they’re capable of.
For these reasons I strongly oppose the vast majority of the proposed cuts to our school district budget. Instead we should be exploring alternative approaches to resolving the current budget problems, including the re-passing of the levy our community agreed to in the year 2000. While I realize that a levy wouldn’t go into effect immediately, it would certainly give the School Board much more flexibility in how they approach the short term issues, and it would provide the long term support that our schools and our community need.
I would encourage those who wish to learn more about those alternatives to attend school board meetings, follow developments in these pages, and visit MorrisQualitySchools.org for more information.
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