LETTER: Let School Board Know What Your Priorities Are

3-12-10

To the Editor:
The Cooperstown School Board has a nearly impossible job to do this year.
After the meeting on March 3 at which the board presented the first draft of next year’s budget, I left with a very foreboding sense of doom.
Seeing a smaller budget this year and significant staff and program cuts, yet knowing that it comes with an 8.8 percent tax increase is shocking.
New York State is cutting the amount of school aid, yet it does not seem to be lessening the burden of state-mandated programs. 
It would be much easier for me to swallow such a significant drop in aid if the decrease was matched by a lessening of that mandated burden.
It was good to see so many people at the meeting. Parents, taxpayers, students, teachers and anyone else who feels that a quality education is a right, not a privilege, should be attending the public session at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 10, in the middle/high school cafeteria.
I do not envy this school board, or any school board in New York State right now.
So much of the budget is out of their control. Fuel costs, health insurance, state mandated programs and costs, the teachers’ union contracts; these things take up, at my guess, about 88-90 percent of the school budget.
We need to let our school board know what is important to us and to our kids. We need to focus that concern on what it costs to do what we want our schools to do. We need to come to the meeting with constructive ideas on saving money.
It is not a case of programs being cut simply to lessen a tax burden. It is a case of having less money to spend. If the state won’t lessen the burden of mandated costs, where do we make adjustments?
It is not easy this year, and probably won’t be for years to come, but we must let the board know what is important to us, and we must come with ideas and suggestions that can truly help in these times of serious state fiscal distress.
ROGER C. LANSING
Cooperstown