We have no real choice

Like many school districts around the state, the Mountain Home School District is facing a serious financial crisis.

Because the legislature didn't have the guts to do it, a temporary supplemental levy tax increase is being requested by the school board to tide them over through the crisis. The legislature threw the burden onto local taxpayers.

It comes at a horrible time. Very few people have extra money right now. If they've got a job, they're worried about keeping it. They're being tight with their household budgets. So asking them to approve a local tax increase is hard, and the school district knows it.

But district officials make an important point. The burden should not fall entirely on the shoulders of the teachers, who will be taking a pay cut as it is, and if the levy passes, paying the extra taxes on top of that. Without the levy, the pay cuts teachers would have to take would be devastating and ultimately, the entire local economy would be hurt.

Over the last 20 years the school district has shown significant fiscal responsibility. It's never built up the kind of "pad" some districts have. It has asked taxpayers for what it has needed, and no more, while doing the best job it can to educate our children and offer a reasonable number of "enrichment" classes and activities -- which are now disappearing.

It hasn't helped that the legislature and the current state superintendent of public education have shown a clear anti-public education bias. As just one example, charter schools, which can pick and choose their students (thus needing fewer counselors, special education and English as a Second Language instructors), are funded by the state at a level nearly twice that provided for each student in the public schools ($8,500 per charter student compared to $4,500 per public school student per year).

They've thrown the burden of funding schools back on the local districts and is only fair that we accept our responsibilities as citizens and agree to share the burden, rather than throwing it all on the backs of the teachers. That wouldn't be fair, at all.

There really isn't a choice. If we are going to maintain any semblance of a quality education experience for our children and grandchildren, we must -- no matter how reluctantly -- bite the bullet and vote yes on the supplemental levy when it comes up for a vote. The consequences of not doing so are too disastrous to even contemplate.

-- Kelly Everitt