Look Beyond the School Budget Numbers

Part of a newspaper’s role is to shed light on how tax dollars are spent, especially when officials seek to complicate what should be simple. Doling out the public’s money can be time consuming, so it is incumbent upon the media to help our public officials be as transparent as possible. This is especially important here in Putnam, which, out of America’s 3,100 counties, has the tenth highest property taxes in the nation. Our local school districts contribute significantly to this high taxation, making the school budget vote on May 18 an important occasion.

To help our readers make an informed decision on whether or not to support the proposed budgets for their respective districts, we are publishing a variety of financial data from the Mahopac, Carmel, Brewster, and Putnam Valley school districts. We are also printing the 2009 salaries, as provided by seethroughny.net, of the highest paid teachers in our local schools to give voters a general idea of how teachers are compensated for their important work.

If the education provided locally is truly superior, then perhaps the high costs are worth it, even as our state plunges into insolvency. But it is important to remember that numbers do not tell the whole story. You can examine school budget statistics ad infinitem, casting them in different lights, and still not know the answer to the most critical question: What are our children learning?

G.K Chesterton observed that “Education is simply the soul of society as it passes from one generation to another.” The education of the youth is the most critical task of each generation; we are obliged to pass on the lessons learned from past triumphs and disasters. In America today, many students learn very little about the basic history and principles of our nation, much less of the Western Civilization that gave birth to our free Republic. As we have said before, too often, schoolchildren are more occupied building birds nest with Popsicle sticks than actually studying things of consequence. This does them a great disservice—and the time lost now cannot be gained later.

Democracy requires an educated citizenry lest it denigrate into the tyranny of mob rule. Moreover, a true education should be one of the pleasures and benefits of our modern, stable, and free society. An empowering force, education can help each of us to do the maximum amount of good with our lives. An education that lacks a thorough grounding in the fundamentals of our history, culture, and civics will create a generation of untethered souls, lost both in history and on their own soil. Lacking knowledge of the past, they will be left without guides or maps to help them figure out where they should be going.

So before heading to the school polls on May 18, consider taking a few minutes to quiz your child on some basic aspects of our national and local civic life. Ensure that the high cost of schooling includes, at the very least, the most rudimentary aspects of education. If your child of reasonable age, without the aid of Google, cannot answer nearly all of questions we have provided—or other such questions as you may wish to devise— perhaps a clear message should be sent to the school districts on Election Day.