Enough arm-twisting

Reading a recent letter to the editor on school accreditation took me back to a conversation I had with a school finance official, from a large city in Massachusetts, who happens to be a relative of mine.

The conversation I had with this person started off talking about the cost of education and how it has outgrown the pocketbooks of many towns and cities. During this conversation he brought up the same Association that the Sentinel article speaks of, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges.

During this conversation, I got to hear of many situations where the accreditation group would recommend to a school in his city that it needed to do certain things to bring the school up to the standards it set forth, nothing to do with the states education department, just the accreditation group. I asked if that group contributed any funds to these schools, and the answer was no, just an opinion.

As the conversation went on, I heard the phrase "perfect world" used many times along with the name New England Association of Schools and Colleges. This was his way of saying the group's recommendations would be great if we lived in a perfect world, but we all know we don't have a perfect world, do we. One of the examples he noted was the group recommending the purchase of more computers, a lot more computers. The computers were purchased, only to sit idle most of the time. Another example was the recommendation that more support staff were needed, this was after the student population had gone down. Their recommendations sounded like a one-size-fits-all, one with a big deep pockets. The topic of the conversation in a nutshell was the fact that if the schools had to adhere to all of the recommendations the accreditation group had given, costs would have been prohibitive, even for a large city, without the taxes going up well beyond the normal increases.

Education should be a high priority. It is a high priority, but it should be as high as the town or city can afford without taxing people beyond their means to pay.

I guess what bothers me is the fact that an association that does not fund the costs of education can dictate what a school should be and hold accreditation dangling over our heads. This is an opinion, an opinion our district has paid for. It should not be used as a tool for arm-twisting the taxpayer into doing something he cannot afford.

I was under the impression that the SAT scores is what colleges looked at for entrance. Does it really matter that the school had a wooden building that housed the gymnasium or did not have an Olympic size swimming pool? Have we turned into a keep-up-with-the-Joneses society or is that a preference of the educators? I thought the students academic advancements were the first priority.

The taxpayers of the Monadnock district would do well to examine what our students are getting from the current curricula before spending more money on something that a paid association of outsiders thinks we should have. We the taxpayers know what we can and cannot afford and threatening to pull an accreditation of questionable value does not help the situation. More pressure on Concord to live up to the court's decision would be a better direction to go. Taxpayers of the Monadnock district have enough pressure on them now in paying their taxes, we don't need someone twisting our arms.