Page 18 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • April 4, 2012 Spanish. Had he persisted in special education in northwest Bergen County, I suspect he would have learned to read to some degree, but his full potential as a student might well have been vitiated, and he would have cost the taxpayers several times more than he would have cost as a mainstream student. Paying for the mistakes made by academic professionals in other districts should not be part of the northwest Bergen County taxpayers’ fiscal burden. Volunteer tutoring is an option for those who are interested. We do need schools to build and maintain a strong America. However, across the nation, high school kids read at the fifth grade level. They are assigned books to make them nicer people, not to expand their vocabularies or knowledge bases. Measured against the rest of the developed, (and developing) world, American kids routinely test around 16th in reading, 26th in science, and 32nd in math. The kids who depend exclusively on the schools for their educations are the ones dragging down the national test scores – because the schools aren’t cutting it for them. “Investing in education” takes on a whole new meaning when you realize that the kids in the top decile generally got there because Mom and Pop or someone paid by Mom and Pop put the hard edge on their academic prowess, and that those kids voluntarily or otherwise submitted to the kind of homework that was not compatible with what mainstreamers consider a normal social life. When the cult of The Big Game and The Prom collides with the cult of 2400 on the SATs or else, guess who gets into the Ivy League colleges, top technical schools, and the top state universities? I have been there as a parent and as a guest lecturer, and I have a pretty good idea. Spending more money on education only works when, as a corollary, you can get rid of teachers who are not doing the job and expel those students whose classroom or playground violence makes it impossible for smart students to expand their knowledge and challenged students to stay afloat. Money is not the only answer. Money is not even the most important part of the answer. The parents who should receive unconditional respect are those who are willing to pay part of their own freight. Schools all over northwest Bergen County benefit from Parent Teacher Organizations, Home and School Associations, education foundations, or sports parents who give the schools the additional money for programs they consider important. Older people, single people, and those without children derive no benefit from school athletics, but if the parents want to pay for the equipment and the buses, the other folks have no reason to grumble. The same is true of the study of art and music outside the mainstream. The kids at the Asian Festival and the other ethnic celebrations at Ridgewood High School pay for their own costumes and donate the money they raise to good causes like tsunami relief and Doctors without Borders. They have every right to take pride in the cultures they support and honor at their own expense. They would, conversely, have no right to soak the taxpayers for the bill as some sort of guilt-ridden entitlement. The school boards have taken a step forward in keeping the tax increases moderate. Now they need to take 10 or 12 steps backward in reducing school costs so neighborhoods with good schools can again become affordable for blue-collar families with bright kids who aspire to teaching or the professions, and to older people who have not had kids in school for decades but want to stick around. Towns with bad schools attract the kids of people whose negligence leads to unsafe neighborhoods and streets and a stultifying level of local culture. Towns whose sole inducement is excellent schools may shortly strangle themselves as the taxes become so exorbitant that older people do not hang around once the kids graduate and nobody wants to join the volunteer fire department or the ambulance corps. We need to strike a balance. We will not do so unless we not only slow up on expenditures, but actually shift into reverse. The school budgets coming up on the radar appear to have the right idea: It’s best to stay within the state-mandated two percent cap, rather than seek permission to exceed that limit. Restricting the annual, predictable, seemingly inevitable increase is the right idea, but the budgets are still moving in the wrong direction. They need decrease a lot instead of increase a little. American Lockstep is the dance at the school gym: Education is the answer! Without education we will all go back to the caves, the tepees, the tenements, or the log cabins and mud-and-wattle huts from whence we sprang. Spending 12, 16, or 19 years in school is the only way to prepare for a job that can facilitate the American dream of a house in the suburbs with a manicured lawn that drains into HoHo-Kus Brook and floods Ridgewood Village Hall, a car for everyone in the family over 17 years of age so we can finish off the polar caps within our lifetimes, and the sort of professional skills that would leave our public health system crippled if we did not import physicians from India and Pakistan and nurses from Korea and the Philippines. Can there possibly be anything wrong with this picture? Is it better not to think about it, because nobody else thinks about it and you don’t want to stand out in the crowd? Northwest Bergen County represents a special case, because there are no really bad schools. The money we pay in residential property taxes – not to mention that most of our residents have at least one college degree and are educated consumers where education is concerned – protect us from the worst excesses of a system which has, in many locations around the state and the nation, gone absolutely wild. Take as a case in point a 10-year-old who recently moved from Hudson County to a northwest Bergen County town. The local school district tested the kid and placed him in the second grade, which means he was effectively left back twice based on his birth date. He was then placed in special education. The kid’s mother had a friend who was a college graduate from days of yore with a dusty teacher’s certificate, and the friend started to tutor the kid one-on-one. The tutor discovered that the child appeared to be of normal intelligence, even though he couldn’t read many words. The accredited non-teacher taught the kid with books from the public library and, in two weeks, he was sounding out words like “printer” and “inventor” in a book about Benjamin Franklin and enjoyed being able to understand an illustrated story in print without recourse to TV or movies. His intelligence, in fact, was now confirmed as approximately normal. The accredited non-teacher said she would keep up the program – at no cost to the taxpayer – until he was ready for mainstream class work perhaps a year down the road. When the accredited non-teacher asked the 10-year-old what he had done in school in Hudson County, she found out that he had spent all day in class coloring pictures. This, he gave her to understand, was how the school system coped with anyone whose home language was neither English nor The right idea in the wrong direction Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: We would like to thank FLOW Follies Executive Producer Carla Pappalardo, the writers, cast members, director, stagehands, and the numerous support staff for a brilliant production of “Come FLOW with Me.” The many hours of rehearsal were evident as the acting, singing, and dancing were stellar as the Follies team from three towns and two schools worked together to create one truly great show. We also congratulate the FLOW Follies producers on this year’s senior luncheon on Sunday, and thank the local companies that donated food for that event. It made for a particularly special afternoon. As the FLOW Follies, Kudos for FLOW Follies founded 26 years ago, approaches raising a half-million dollars in college scholarships provided to FLOW students, we see what our FLOW communities can accomplish in the spirit of collaboration and fun. Christopher De Phillips, Mayor of Wyckoff Linda Schwager, Mayor of Oakland Brian D. Scanlan, Wyckoff Township Committeeman Sandra Coira, Oakland Councilwoman Belsky and Finance Committee Chairman Thomas Bunting, indicates that the district’s 2012-13 budget continues the board’s efforts of the past few years to exercise discipline in the management and operation of the district while maintaining and enhancing academic and extracurricular programs. They emphasized that the district’s spending is almost $1 million less than the district is legally permitted to spend under the statutory budget cap for this year and, for the second year in a row, the budget provides for a decrease in the general fund tax levy. “We would be remiss not to point out that a substantial portion of operational savings, constituting almost a halfmillion dollars, is the direct result of our new agreement with the teachers’ union that positively impacts the cost of health insurance that we provide to district employees,” Belsky and Bunting stated. In an effort to continue to budget responsibly for capital projects, they pointed out that $950,000 will be spent on maintenance and improvements pursuant to the longrange facilities plan, and $400,000 more was budgeted to enhance technology infrastructure. Belsky and Bunting emphasized that the district is exploring strategies for controlling the cost of providing special education services for in-district students and for those placed out-of-district in more specialized educational facilities. These costs now total $7.6 million and represent over 15 percent of the district’s budget. They advised that, in the coming year, the district will be investing $280,000 in a new “wrap around” program designed to provide bet ter ser vices to the st udent (continued on page 19) FLOW budget (continued from page 5) percent; $7,584,630 for employee benefits, an increase of $154,099, or two percent; $1,390,384 for equipment and capital reserve, an increase of $109,644, or 8.6 percent; $543,893 for special programs, an increase of $37,608, or 7.4 percent; and $1,726,415 for debt service, an increase of $4,800, or .28 percent. School Business Administrator Frank Ceurvels pointed out that the district’s tax levy has decreased two years in a row. He said the budget is $5.6 million under the budget that was projected for this year in a 2008 district forecast, and $2.3 million under the projection for the state’s budget cap for this year. Ceurvels also compared the district’s per pupil cost ranking to 46 other regional high school districts and showed that the Ramapo Indian Hills had improved from 45th place to 35th place from 2005-06 school to 2009-10, the latest school year for which the state has released spending information. He said the district has one of the lowest per pupil cost increases over that time period. He praised the collaborative efforts of the district’s employees to reduce costs, and the teacher’s union for its agreement to contribute toward the district’s health care plan. He highlighted other cost saving measures, such as freezing coaches’ and advisors’ stipends and a reduction in utility costs. A statement issued by School Board President Ira