Dr. David Hopson
It’s an interesting conundrum that the district and our member towns face with the current failure to approve an operating budget for this school year. Despite being 3 months into the fiscal year and reducing the overall budget request, we still have the towns of Chester, Russell, and Worthington unable to approve their assessments. Having attended the Chester special town meeting and discussing their issues, hearing about the Russell town meeting from those who attended, and anticipating the issues from Worthington based upon past meetings, I know that each town has very different reasons for not approving the budget. While I don’t agree with holding our budget hostage, which may hurt students over the long run, I do see and have some sympathy for the towns’ positions.
Much like the current debacle at the national level over the federal budget, and soon the debt ceiling, where coupling items together for political leverage jeopardizes individual wellbeing and the economy, I feel that the towns use of voting against the school budget to make various political statements is ill conceived, poorly executed, and putting the onus on the wrong party. Of course it may work out for everyone’s benefit. Perhaps Chester will be able to leverage Worthington’s withdrawal with the lack of a school budget to convince the Legislature to change the funding formula for schools, even though many similar attempts over the past twenty years have yielded very meager returns. If the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education really does come in and scrupulously examines all of the district’s finances, perhaps they’ll find the ‘errors’ so often attributed to the district administration and school committee and dramatically reduce the budget and town assessments as Russell seems to believe. The alternative is that, after reviewing the district and town finances, the DESE allows the budget to stand, or even, as in the case with the Quabbin Regional School District, increases the budget and makes towns pay the difference over what the district had asked for. In either case, we’ll have some idea of what to look forward to in the future. And, in Worthington’s case, perhaps the state will see that the education that the people of Worthington want for their children is far and above what the remaining towns wish to fund, and Worthington will get the chance to have their own school system and pay considerably more to fund the school they want, which the district is not able to afford to provide them at this time.
My biggest ongoing concern is not with the school committee (who is doing their best to provide appropriate services to students and not likely to gut services to provide savings to the towns), nor the town officials (who are all doing their best to meet an impossibility – fund education at an increasing level to cover reductions from the state, while still providing town services and keeping taxes low) but rather with the district’s staff and parents who seem to avoid town meetings like the plague. In fact, I’d like to complement those few parents and staff members who do attend and speak their minds at town meetings. I know that town meetings are not many people’s favorite event to attend, given the often confrontational aspect of items on town meeting warrants, yet this is the most ‘democratic’ institution left in our government, where every citizen has the right to participate and vote on the issues of the day. As reported in the Country Journal, a voter in Chester asked where all the parents were that should be concerned with approving the school budget and the education of their children, rather than the 55 and older crowd who likely didn’t have children in the district. I would ask that same question to the district staff who live in our member towns regarding their participation in the process of approving a budget that supports their work with students.
I’m guessing that time will tell whether the gamble that individuals, and our towns, are making with the district’s budget pays off or whether, like most gambling establishments, the odds are with the house (in this case I think that would be the state).
