Education - An Investment You Can Bank On

Hi Mrs. B.

I was reading the news this morning and read an opinion piece that spoke to the heart of a subject near and dear to our hearts: budget cuts to schools and educational programs.

Mrs. B., we've spoken about this you and I (before I started blogging, years ago now) that investing in children's education is investing in the future. It's part of why you kept working at a school library in a small town on a shoestring budget for so many years, why you took time with kids like me to introduce us to books that would spark our minds and foster our curiosity. I don't think I would be nearly as well educated without you and teachers like you throughout my young life.



But, the sad part was and is just how much money makes it to schools to keep them running. It just keeps dropping. And when the budgets drop, schools close. Of the schools that had been Back Home when my family moved into the area, economic depression and other forces reduced the number of K-6 schools from four public and four private schools in the city boundary itself down to one public and one private in a town that once was home to an air force base large enough to be on the list to land the space shuttle.

Not only that, but there's a disproportionate concept of where the money should go. Less money goes to the libraries, to getting new books for classes, new equipment for science and arts classes, and more goes into getting equipment for the sports teams.

Do they really need new uniforms every year? New equipment? Personally, I'm an Arts and Sciences person. I'm someone who thinks education is what you're going to school for. I do see the lessons one can learn on a sports team -- leadership, team building, and so on. But kids need a place to learn and an environment that fosters opportunities that fire up interests and encourages learning, however learning might happen.

I remember Mrs. C. in High School soldering together pieces of broken flutes to have one usable wind instrument for band and yet hearing that the football team was getting new sacking equipment and thinking "Excuse me!?" This was also the same year that I realized that my bio teacher was told to keep using the old books -- the same books she'd learned from when she'd been in that school as a girl (interroBANG!?) because there was no money in the budget to replace them. But, it was perfectly legitimate to fund the sports teams. Now, this was a private school, and private schools can do whatever they like with the moneys they take in. And I've been asked for money from my former high school Alma Mater recently (a school that now encompasses the whole of catholic education in the metro area, if you can call it that, where there had been several other smaller schools at one time scattered over the city), but was told that I couldn't designate where the money should go when I mentioned the science labs or the global studies classes (not that I have all that much to give). I had some serious cold feet about giving them anything, but at the same time, the idea of not supporting educational opportunities for children was abhorent to me.

My home town isn't alone in consolidating schools, and as I said it's not just the private schools. Most of the town and village schools in the tri-county area -- heck, in most of upstate New York -- have been consolidated and budgets crunched to ridiculousness. Something's going to give somewhere. There are kids who are having to travel over an hour to get to school in the morning because the local town school was closed due to lack of funds.

And down in Maryland and Virginia, where I'm living now, I've been hearing terrible things about schools being closed and consolidated because they don't have the funds to maintain the buildings. Teachers teaching through illnesses they're getting because of poorly maintained buildings, teachers forced to teach double room-capacity classes because other schools were closed and the kids had to go somewhere. Teachers having to spend out of pocket to bring supplies to class to give kids a good educational opportunity. That, thanks to constrained budgets some of the few joys of a student's educational experience -- field trips, particularly -- have been eliminated entirely.

Our teachers really are under-recognized in the level of commitment they really do bring to the party. They do their best to bring opportunities to students and they work in the worst conditions since education really has become such a low priority for our governing bodies and budget makers.

The author of the article I linked to says that what happened in her school district "could happen to you." I posit, Mrs. B, that it already has. And we really need to do something about it. We do need to encourage our policy makers, but we also need to encourage our communities to think outside the box, too. Maybe we could be providing opportunities within the community for mentors or unorthodox learning. More community members stepping forward to volunteer time or supplies. We've got to think differently. We have to re-prioritize. We have to change.

We're playing roulette with the future. If we don't fund education, the next generation will not prepared to compete in the global setting.

Hats off to you, Mrs. B, and to the rest of my former educators. May the budget-makers finally start listening.

-Odd.

PS:  There's a petition going around about ensuring children have access to effective school libraries. Have a look. I already added my John Hancock to it. -OA-