Apathy About the School Budget

Thu
14
May
News Staff's picture

Apathy About the School Budget

Until recently, the public had been asked to approve the Board of Education's budget during an election held in April. We always thought it was strange that we were asked to vote on the school budget but not on the municipal or county spending plans. We reasoned that we had elected the offi cials to create the budgets and if we didn't like what they were doing, we could fail to re-elect them in the future. We now think that this reasoning was fl awed. There was a great deal of effort put into the passage of the school budget when it was subject to a vote. There were public hearings and there were loud, often contentious, discussions. Now that the public is no longer voting on the school district's spending plan, the attention seems to have diminished immeasurably and apathy seems to have taken over. There are no more budget task forces, made up of people who worked hard to disseminate the information about how our tax dollars were being spent. That is not to intimate that the budget is put together without a lot of hard work, many meetings with staff members, and many public meetings dedicated to budget discussion. However, the lack of decision power seems to have engendered an apathy among our residents, who feel that they have no control – the Board can do whatever it wants as long as it does not increase the budget by more than two per cent. If the budget exceeds the two per cent cap, then it must be approved by the voters. To view more please log in or subscribe to the digital edition ...

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