As in most previous years, the Claremont school board thought it would be able to fund the coming school year through a ransom.
You know how a ransom works, right? You decide how much money you want, and then you collect it from people by threatening to hurt them in some way if they don’t give it to you.
And just like that… the board learned that it will have to rely on a budget.
You know how a budget works, right? You figure out how much money you have, and then you prioritize what to spend it on.
In the case of a family, this would mean making sure that you pay for what you need (food, housing, heat, clothing, transportation) before thinking about what you’d like (a second car, new phones, streaming movie services, annual vacations, horseback riding lessons for the kids)
That is, you take care of essentials before turning to incidentals.
Fortunately, the Claremont school board was quite clear at its August 20 meeting about what it considers essential, when board chair Heather Whitney said:
Crisis management requires priorities. For the district, the top priority in the coming days and weeks is that every student has a place to learn, that every parent can rest knowing our doors are open.
It’s important to note what she didn’t say. She didn’t say that the top priority is for the students to learn. Or for the students to have the opportunity to learn. Neither of these would require most of the students to leave home.
She said that the top priority of the district is to provide students with a place to learn, so the parents can rest.
In other words, the Claremont school board just admitted what everyone knows but no one wants to say: that the highest priority of the district is to provide, not education, but daycare.
We heard a lot of people at that meeting (and the following one) talking about the importance of sports, and extracurriculars (like drama and music), and job training. We heard almost no one talking about the importance of literacy and numeracy.
But the question everyone kept coming back to was: Can the schools open, and stay open? As if that’s an all-or-nothing decision. The question no one was asking was: When we open the schools, what should they prioritize?
If Claremont decided to do nothing except keep the buildings open and heated, bus kids to and from school, and provide enough adult supervision (which would not have to be provided by certified teachers) to keep the kids (mostly) out of trouble, it would be able to satisfy what its board has said is its top priority — providing daycare for the parents of students.
Is there enough money to do this? With a budget approaching $30,000 per kid, there’s just no way that this is not possible.
So the board could start there, and build on it. For example, only a third of the students in the district are proficient in reading, and only a fifth are proficient in math. So to basic daycare, the district could add courses and tutoring in literacy and numeracy. And for those students who can read, the district could offer basic guidance about how to advance their own educations by, you know, reading.
(“I’d like to know more about chemistry, or American history, or forestry. What would be the best books for me to read?”)
Again, there’s no way that this is beyond what the district can afford. And it would probably be better for the students than what they’re doing now.
And if there’s money left, it would be up to the school board to decide what the next most important additions would be. Which is more important, music or math? Which is more important, physics or physical education? Which is more important, finance or French?
Note that this idea — that some subjects are more important than others — never even has to be considered under the ransom model.
(A Croydon superintendent once explained at a school board meeting that it’s okay for students to fail at academics, if they are “excelling at extracurricular activities”.).
Note that if the district took this approach, there is a good chance that the kids who actually want to learn would be better able to do so, since their attention wouldn’t be diverted by the antics of the kids who don’t want to learn (who could go horse around in the gym), by political indoctrination masquerading as instruction, by an arbitrary schedule imposed on them, and by all the other things that schools do to make it harder for those kids to learn.
And — as the district’s abysmal test scores demonstrate — the kids who don’t want to learn aren’t going to learn anyway.
(Two more questions that never get considered under the ransom model: (1) If a kid wants to learn something, who can stop him? (2) If a kid doesn’t want to learn something, who can make him?)
So on average, we could actually expect student achievement to increase, rather than decrease.
But what about the kids who want to play a sport, or play a musical instrument, or act in a play, or learn to use a CNC machine? Well, that’s what community centers are for, isn’t it?
If a wealthy benefactor were to appear and hand the Claremont school district a suitcase containing enough cash to make up its deficit, it wouldn’t really fix anything, because he would just be giving the money to a collection of people who can’t tell the difference between what is essential and what is incidental.
All of which is to say, if being forced to switch from a ransom to a budget is recognized for the opportunity that it is, rather than lamented as the tragedy it’s being made out to be, it could be one of the best things ever to happen to the children, parents, and taxpayers of Claremont.
