Your story about Niles Township schools’ financial woes was important for what it revealed and did not reveal (“Niles schools seeing red ink,” Metro, Jan. 31).
People should know that even prosperous school districts with strong, diverse tax bases face tough financial decisions year after year. However, while you do mention that one contributing factor is “increased instructional costs,” your snapshot approach does not reveal one of the important underlying causes of this particular financial issue, a cause rooted in shortsightedness.
Your article was too short to clarify for readers that the cost of teachers’ salaries has not actually contributed to this increase in instructional costs. In fact, the overall cost of paying teachers is going down because of the large number of teachers retiring.
But the 21st Century is not one in which humanism looms large; rather, we have identified technology as that highway by which we will reach a better future. And school districts across the country have been attempting to wring from their budgets every dollar possible to spend on computers. Sadly, they are never one-time costs, and school boards have not properly planned for the ongoing costs of upkeep and outrunning obsolescence. This is the case in Niles, where the draining of the educational fund has been the result partly of the three-fold increase in the information technology staff over the last six years.
The public hears much about incompetent teachers and low test scores and much about the technological wonders pervading our schools. While the former are blamed for nearly everything wrong with education, little is said about the lack of real impact that the latter has on our kids’ educational growth. Likewise, little is said about the effect on long-term financial health of buying up every technological wonder for our schools when little has been proven concerning their worth.
We think we know the effect of a good or poor teacher. But rarely do we ask the measurable effect of a computer. Maybe we should start.
