Letter to the Editor, Groton Herald - sent 7 April 2010
Dear Editor,
My understanding is that despite
the poor economy in 2009, the GDRSD School Committee approved a 3-year
teacher’s contract that gave them a 7% per year raise. This is illuminating in
view of the recent squabbling between the Selectmen and the Town manager over
whether non-union Town employees should get a 2% COLA increase. One hesitates
to ask what contractual increases the various unionized Town
employees are getting, but I suspect that it wasn’t any 7% per year. Sometimes
I wish that we had the taxing system that New York has, where the schools send
out their own tax bills. There’s nothing like seeing it laid out in black and
white on paper, just how much you’re paying for the schools.
A recent letter to the Herald
pointed out that GDRSD was cutting a number of teachers and apparently no
non-teaching staff. At Town Meeting a couple of years back, I made the point
(rhetorically) that the public schools, including GDRSD, were "top
heavy" with non-teaching personnel. The Superintendent got up on his hind
feet and said that I was wrong, that only 43% of the GDRSD personnel were
non-teaching. Pardon Me! I stand corrected! But the point here is, that 57% of
the GDRSD personnel just got locked into a 7% per year raise for the next three
years, in very bad financial times.
Now, as an old critic of the way
the public schools operate, I really have to question the 43% non-teaching
personnel and also the presence of a fair number of Teacher’s Aides, Guidance
Counselors and other “support” personnel, whether teaching or not. When I was
in school, we had larger classes than we do today, and I don’t recall any
Teacher’s Aides – the teachers were able to give 30 or so students a good
education all by themselves. – and the guidance counselor’s job was to help
high school seniors get into the right college, not to act as surrogate parents
and psychologists.
I’m running for Selectman. I
realize that the Selectmen don’t have other than moral suasion with GDRSD but
the Selectmen do have some influence
over the Town’s spending practices, and I will certainly take every advantage
of that to try to keep our taxes as low as possible. Now is not the time to be giving raises and hiring new personnel and
expensive consultants. Rather, we should be looking at ways to enlarge,
energize and assist our volunteer committees to perform much of the work of our
Town Government.