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I don’t normally do this but I felt compelled to write about something more personal – our town, Port Washington’s school budget vote.  

 

Port Washington is a smallish, character-laden town on Long Island’s North Shore- yes, the Gold Coast.  I decided to vote Yes, even though I get all the arguments put forth by the No voters.  Yes, we spend $21,000 a student in our district (surprisingly, this fact does not seem to generate much ire), but in return 97% of our students go to college, with 10% of last year’s class purportedly being accepted to Ivy League schools.  Moreover we spend less than most surrounding towns, if that can be believed, and voting No to the budget has little if any role in resolving the nettlesome teachers’ contract issue.  Though I certainly am on the side of rewarding better teachers rather than merely those who have hung around the longest, my town is hardly the ideal petri dish for this experiment to take hold.

But having listed these reasons, it somehow feels like the rabid pro-budget voters might be missing something crucial.  Reading about my hometown New Jersey voters’ dissatisfaction, I started thinking about this more.  I, too, was tempted last year to vote No, based mainly on the idea that all around me were stories of school budget scandals and thefts, including a long-running, multi-million dollar rip-off perpetuated by some folks formerly of Roslyn, now inhabiting a 9×12 cell.  Without knowing the specifics, I think a reasonable hypothesis for my New Jersey brethren voting no to school budgets would be the impact of similar situations that have been reported on there. If true, the people in charge who stole or wasted money now have done so twice: once to the existing students, and once to the future students. 

So off to the Middle School I went.  Before going home, I agreed to hand out flyers at the train station, urging people to vote yes (tangent:  I did not wear anything identifying me as a yes voter, and in fact held the flyers upside down, yet people’s reaction was generally negative.  I couldn’t totally figure this out; one of the candidates explained that people feel guilty for shirking their civic duty and thus seeing someone else do so much – not that handing out flyers for an hour and a half should qualify me for a purple heart – makes them embarrassed.  Sounds plausible, but I sense that people are also sick of being told what to do, and being assaulted with messages from telemarketers, spam, and the like.  Anyway, it was unpleasant.) 

What hit me, following my reading of the now-popular book Freakonomics is this bit of circularity (is this a word? if not it should be):  our town is a desirable one for four reasons, two of which, the proximity to NYC via train and the proximity to the water/shore, are not going away.  The third reason, the aesthetic, is already disappearing, in my opinion, as more old homes are torn down to make way for double or triple Lego houses on the same plot.  Yet this has an appeal to some people too, as reflected by rising real estate values. 

The fourth, and in my mind clearly THE most important item in desirability, ergo real estate values, is the school system.  So think of it this way, people who argue that we spend too much on these schools (and again, as anyone who knows me knows, I think taxes in general are way too high for everyone, owing largely to waste, Congressional Pork, programs that never die, etc.):  the reason your taxes are so high is because your home is so valuable.  The reason your home is so valuable is because the schools are excellent.  So you can bemoan paying more for these schools, but then you need to consider that the home you have that you can sell for $900,000 likely would be worth a third less were the schools to be perceived as poor.   You can’t have it both ways, and as always, it’s better to keep a huge portion of a lot of money than 100% of nothing. 

Sooooo, the old cliché seems to apply here: in for a penny, in for a pound.  We are already voting Yes to extraordinary spending, and have already “chosen” our schools, merely by living here and paying the overall taxes that we do on the North Shore.  Once there, it makes little sense to dither over another few hundred dollars, which around here doesn’t even cover a night out with your spouse once you pay the sitter and particularly when the school results have been as good as they have.  (Why am I picturing Sally Struthers and a little sad-faced kid now?) 

So even though our system is not perfect, it still does amazingly well, and given its importance, we need to make sure that nothing interrupts this level of service. Sermon over. 

UPDATE:  Port’s Budget passed by a huge margin.

Randy Shain blogs at True Schools.