Are we spending wisely?

If you pay attention at all to what goes on outside of Clay County, you will be aware of the study results in Vigo County that advised closure of several schools due to under use of existing facilities within the corporation.

Just this week, The Indianapolis Business Journal reported that Anderson Community School Corporation's school board voted to close six of its schools in order to trim 5 percent from their operating budget.

When was the last time we assessed the true building needs in our community and why haven't we looked for ways to cut costs in non-academic areas in order to meet the individual educational needs of the children of the community by providing a program to develop the skills necessary to earn a living and enjoy a high quality of life by developing and maintaining a high standard of excellence in its educational program?

Sorry for the run-on sentence.

In case you didn't recognize it, it is paraphrased right from the school corporation's mission statement.

The reduction of just one school could free up funds for at least three additional teachers instantly with reduction of ancillary staff at that facility. Who knows how much we could save in operating costs when we continue to put our heads in the sand and not try to find out?

But instead of looking to see if we might possibly be in the position to save money that would allow more students more exposure time to teachers, this corporation is yet again expanding its physical plant along with the financial obligation to maintain it.

Long before the recent economic downturn, I requested that the board look into this possibility before engaging in a building improvement program that would expand our financial obligations while we continue to discreetly cut back on academics. Our elementary class size has crept up and our high school class offerings have been slowly decreasing in the past five-six years.

First, it was upper foreign language classes at Clay City. Then, they were being cut at Northview.

Other classes started to be offered only every other year. Slowly, fewer sections of other courses were offered. Other courses were then cut to only be offered every other year. Then came the grouping of AP courses at the same time of day so they were not truly available to all who wanted to take them. These are only the ones of which I am aware.

I am sure there are others as well.

Meanwhile, standards that have long been recognized as inappropriate, like dropped lowest grades, daily extra credit on homework and quizzes, and offering extra academic credit for boxes of tissues or mushrooms brought into the teacher have still not been corrected though when I complained about them years ago when my children were in elementary and middle school, I was assured that they would be.

For just this past Wednesday at Walmart, I overheard a child telling his mother that he had to get a bag of candy to take to school so he could get two homework passes. The homework is there to help him learn the material, not simply to accumulate credit. If he isn't learning all he can from the class, someone isn't doing their job and someone else isn't making it clear that they aren't doing it.

These are things that can be done to help us adhere to the mission of the corporation that continue to be ignored by a portion of the faculty and by the administration who are their supervisors.

For well over a decade now, Early Bird classes were added as a stop-gap measure when it was determined that a student needs more than 12 credits a year to be the best that they could be. Early Bird provided a raft for a few students who knew they needed more to get where they needed to be on the other side of high school, when what was needed was a bridge so that all could cross. Once put into place, effort stopped for too many years. Currently, 90 of the 92 counties in Indiana have actually been building their bridges for all of their students and we still have just a few who are capable of attempting to cross on that raft.

How many students have gone through our school with that need unmet while we built weight rooms and still improve buildings that we might not even be utilizing fully? How can that be giving every student every opportunity every day?

More recently, additional cutbacks have been made that have eliminated the early bird raft in some cases where only a few realize the need to swim to it on their own. So not only have we left the decision in the hands of the students and parents who may still be unaware of the need due to their lack of awareness in today's educational standards, but we have removed that raft even from students who were actively reaching for it by not always even offering the early bird classes some semesters.

While those specific students may have enough persistence to dog paddle, that opportunity has been lost forever. It is gone as much as it is for all those that never took that seventh class over the last 10-plus years.

We have failed thousands of students while we continue to appease a few who think that buildings will help their education and their future choices. Could the additional funds from closing a school have been enough to add that seventh period?

Have we been wasting time and money not trying to find out?

How many more missed opportunities are we going to let go by?

How many more children are we going to fail?

Shame on us all.