Maintaining a sense of balance for difficult tightrope of budget season
They say money can't buy happiness, but creating a budget just under $93 million to operate a school system can generate a lot of comment, and not all of it kind.
Our children attended Norwich Public Schools (NPS) and, in turn, Norwich Free Academy (NFA). Our son enrolled in third grade and a year later our daughter started kindergarten. Both attended the now-demolished Buckingham School on Washington Street.
I never lost sight of the fact that many (other) people's taxes helped pay for our children's educations, and while I'm not pretending to believe local taxes should be compared to "Take a penny, leave a penny," to a certain extent they are. And speaking of … Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said: 'Taxes are the price we pay for civilized society."
I think/hope we can agree education is a vital investment in however you choose to define civilization. And on the topic of self-evident truths, let's acknowledge the Norwich neighbors who volunteer to serve on the Board of Education (BOE) are secular saints.
Board meetings and those of all its standing committees, including Budget Expenditure and Policy (among many others), are open to the public. You can find the agenda for upcoming meetings, and the minutes (and videos) of previous meetings, on the NPS website (https://www.norwichpublicschools.org/district/board-of-education) and all manner of videos showing our tax dollars at work on their YouTube channel.
For the years we had children in Buckingham and Kelly (BTW, Before the Web), I was a faithful in-person attendee of BOE meetings but even back in those dark days, parental, much less taxpayer, involvement and engagement was on the sparsely attended side. Let's face it, about the only time of the year most adults, parents and/or otherwise, in Norwich pay any attention to school budgets is when dollars are mentioned.
Cast a glance at just about anything, from gasoline to groceries and utilities, and you'll see higher costs. Is it really a surprise that our schools with over 3,200 students in their care would also face the same increases you and I have? We can argue all day about why costs and expenses are escalating but as taxpayers, we know the wisdom of Harry Truman’s immortal, "the buck stops here," because we are where the road and the sky collide.
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Reading online comments and reactions about the proposed budget (spoiler alert: universally unhappy), I recognized many of the names and know they don't have school-age children and so probably don't attend BOE meetings. They know who they are.
I reviewed the March 14 Board of Education online meeting that approved the proposed budget to get a better appreciation of the scale and scope of challenges the board had to weigh and prioritize. It's not great cinema, and doesn't pretend to be, but it's an eye-opener, or was for me, in understanding how tough a job the superintendent and staff, together with the board, have in doing what's right for our children (and they are all our children) and what's best for those of us paying taxes.
It's an impossibly difficult tightrope to walk, and as budget deliberations begin, we all need to maintain both a sense of perspective and balance.
I recall a sentence from an old Plan of Conservation and Development that still applies today: “The future of Norwich depends on the ability of City leadership to bring together disparate opinions around a common vision."
Bill Kenny, of Norwich, writes a weekly column about Norwich issues. His blog, Tilting at Windmills, can be accessed at https://tiltingatwindmills-dweeb.blogspot.com/.
This article originally appeared on The Bulletin: Norwich Public Schools funding: Balancing budget needs for education
