It’s All About the Schools

The following letter was submitted to the Greenwich Time newspaper for publication in April, 2009
On April 21, your paper published a well-written headline article entitled “Schools May Expand Class Sizes” which addressed an extremely important topic for our community.  Whether we realize it or not, everything in our community is ultimately driven by the quality of our schools. We have one of the greatest public school systems in the country but one of the few criticism that can be fairly leveled against our schools is the poor student-to-teacher ratios.  We absolutely cannot allow the schools to increase class sizes because of budgetary constraints.
 
Any family, including my own, will tell you that the quality of the schools is the first consideration when choosing where to live.  Yet this priority goes way beyond simply wanting the best education for our kids.  When a community is perceived as having the best educational system it drives overall demand for housing which ensures sustained long-term value in our real estate investments.  This in turn creates a greater real estate tax base for the community to re-invest in education, and so-on.  Greenwich clearly established this self perpetuating trend in the right direction decades ago.
 
Nevertheless, when I enrolled my son in kindergarten this year I was surprised to find a class size of 20 with one teacher and no assistants.  The quality of the teachers is superb and they do an amazing job under the circumstances.  One of the reasons our schools succeed is that we rely heavily on parent involvement.  Parents make up for poor student-to-teacher ratios by regularly volunteering to assist teachers during class throughout the day.  It is great to see how much parent involvement supports our schools but I just don’t want to see the Town and the school system take advantage of this by pushing class sizes even higher.
 
We all understand the current economic and budgetary situations, at least from a high level.  We just need to keep our priorities straight.  Education expenditures should be the last budgetary item to be cut, if at all.  Furthermore, given the likelihood of increased enrollment due to the economy, we need to maintain academic standards by actually allocating more of the budget to the schools.  This will obviously require painful cuts in other areas but any other decision would be near-sighted.  Please help our community leaders by reminding them that the highest priority should be improving academic standards even when it feels like we should be pinching pennies.

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Published:
April 29, 2009 / 8:26 pm
Category:
Letters to Editor, Town of Greenwich
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