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Letters: Living Beyond School's Means |
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Tom Vawter
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Friday, 28 March 2008 |
 Ms Shattuck's thoughtful and well-argued guest editorial in the current issue of The Star spoke of "an elephant in the room" with regard to the budget shortfall the Lansing School District now faces. The "elephant" in Ms Shattuck's opinion piece seemed to be that the school district was living beyond its means, and that the community is blaming recent past administrators for the district's financial woes.
In my opinion her criticism was right on. As an interested resident of the School District, I'm aware of the effort the School Board and the community put into hiring the past superintendent. It would be discouraging to think that, after such effort, we, the community and our elected School Board, had made such a big mistake.
Am I correct in my understanding that the School Board has fired two successive superintendents before their contracts had run out and had to pay those superintendents contractually agreed upon salaries after they were no longer working for the District? Are we, the tax payers of the School District, currently paying those salaries? If so, this would seem to be the "elephant" and a symptom of the community's illness that Ms Shattuck refers to, and it's not just living beyond our means in the usual sense; it's throwing our money out the window.
Our School Board and our community need to come together in a vision for public education in Lansing, and that vision has to extend beyond the next school board election. One would hope that such a vision would serve our children well, but, more importantly, it needs to serve our society well. We need to educate our children to be better citizens, not just "taxpayers", citizens who recognize the obligations of Locke's "social contract" and who look beyond the petit disagreements like those that have led Lansing into the quagmire we have found ourselves in in recent years.
From: Tom Vawter
Lansing, NY 14882
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