Finding our way through turbulent waters

Make no mistake about it. The Sullivan West School District is in a financially dire situation with a proposed tax increase of 30 to 35 percent. This is not something that is a secret and it is not something that will go away without a radical change in the way the school district is organized.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that Superintendent Alan Derry seems to be exploring every avenue to create a budget that will pass while keeping his eye focused on building a “lighthouse” district that would attract new students and give the current district students a stellar education.

He is working with the State Department of Education to give the district more money, enlisting the assistance of our state representatives to bail out the district, reducing the district staff through a creative attrition program and beginning preliminary studies of how much the district would save with the redistricting of students within the district, as well as the closing of any of the school buildings. He has assembled a group of 30 district members to study the budget, virtually line by line, so that there are more minds that can conceptualize and understand the challenge of this large rural newly formed district—both financially and educationally. It is the hope that through the work of this committee—and their outreach as school ambassadors in explaining this situation to their friends and neighbors—that a vision for the school district’s future can emerge.

It’s a tall order and calls for our best reaction.

One of the most natural human reactions in such a situation is to try to figure out what is to blame and who is at fault. While this is a useful exercise in understanding what to change in the future, too much exploration of what we didn’t do yesterday is wasted energy.

For the record and in its simplest form, the school district’s financial situation has been exacerbated by a decline in the number of students and the low ratio of students to teachers and because merger economies, for whatever reasons, were not made. In addition, the district used a large fund balance that it had on hand last year to lower taxes rather than expending it cumulatively over time.

In moving forward it is critical that we keep our heads and refuse to squander our energies on post mortems of past mistakes. However tempting it might be to give way to panic or to anger, it is only by approaching the future with creativity and vision that we have any hope of coming up with solutions that would be financially tolerable and would create the kind of high-quality educational environment we want for our children.

As a community we need to do all we can to support the superintendent, the school board and the community committee in this process of rethinking. That means burying any hatchets, shedding any grudge, and giving up our preconceptions of our original three school districts and what we thought we were promised with the merger.

We need to think with one objective—the making of a top-notch Sullivan West School District. The caliber of our solutions will directly reflect the caliber of the thought we give to them.

So put on your thinking caps because we truly have a heck of a challenge in front of us.

Dr. Punnybone

They've Been Had!