Recession dictates school board practice frugality
January 30, 2009
Letter to the Sentinel
by Richard Bauries, President MSTA
Dear Sentinel:
William Felton writes Jan.10 that he wants voters to spend millions for renovations at the high school in order to satisfy the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) and retain accreditation for Monadnock High School. At what cost in tax increases? He doesn’t say.
The economy is sinking fast; the recession is deepening. Some analysts are now speculating about depression. Unemployment is over 7% with some economists saying the actual number is closer to 14%. How many in our region will lose their job or business in the coming year? Mr. Felton and his cohorts on the school board and budget committee just handed Swanzey residents an almost $1,000 school tax increase; yet now he demands even more.
Felton terrorizes parents by indicating that without accreditation, the kids somehow won’t fare well educationally. Nonsense. Colleges are concerned with SAT scores, class rank and grades, not school accreditation. When Ms. Bennet from NEASC came to our high school last year, she was asked, out in the hallway, to name a college that required accreditation in order to gain entrance. She replied, “UCONN”, the University of Connecticut. The next day the Monadnock Schools Taxpayers Association spoke to the admissions people at UCONN who told us unequivocally that accreditation was not a factor in student acceptance, even in their medical or dental schools. When we mentioned home schooled students, the lady in admissions practically jumped through the phone with enthusiasm. It seems home schooled kids are highly sought after by UCONN. We also have a letter from the Bellows Falls school district in Vermont stating that colleges are not looking at accreditation for student admissions (see our web site at www.monadnocktaxpayers.org).
Felton is using accreditation as a club to beat parents into submission to his spending habits.
He wants “change and innovation in programs and a continuous upgrading and renewal of the physical facilities”. Only this, he claims, will give students a chance for a good education. What bull. Go to our webpage and read the news blog about Japanese public education where they have forty kids in a class and how some of the school buildings would be condemned by American standards. Yet, the Japanese students (and European, Chinese and Korean!) constantly outperform American students in academic subjects, particularly math and science.
Felton and NEASC are part of the educational-industrial complex, very similar to the military-industrial complex. Create a threat and warn that massive expenditures must be spent to save the imperiled entity – in this case public education at Monadnock.
There are eight people working on Ms. Bennet’s commission at NEASC. They service 655 schools at an average cost of $2,400 per school for each year of accreditation. That’s $1,572,000 a year and this is only the minimum. When they came to Monadnock, the cost was almost $15,000 with another $7,500 due if they were asked to review the final report. Minus some operating expenses, these eight people could be making a serious buck. Do you think for a moment this independent business, for that is exactly what NEASC is, will not tell the educrats in a district exactly what they want to hear in order to keep the money flowing?
This is not the time for new debt. Debt is what got us into this economic crisis. Let the School board trim the budget increase to offset the warrant article for facility upgrades. Taxpaying families are tired of always being the ones that must cut their budgets to stay afloat.