How Do We Keep Paying for All This?

By Jacqueline "Jackie" Burns

Some members of the community assume that there is a lot of waste in the budget that could provide for overall cutbacks. I think the current school board would probably take exception to that view. Moreover, the conundrum of a universal public education mandate is that what seems wasteful to one parent in the community may be something that is providing necessary educational support to the child of another parent.

I would suggest that, as a community and as individual citizens, we need look to other avenues of tax relief. Recently our own state legislators appear to have doled out money to Long Island districts while short-changing Westchester districts. Can we work to rectify that for the next state budget? Like many people in the district I'm sure, my family's health insurance is paid for by employer contributions and deductions from pay. This is also the case for our district teachers and personnel, and increased health insurance cost is a large budget item. Our society depends on individuals and businesses to provide necessary health care coverage. This is another form of taxation that happens to be funneled to the private sector. Should we be more vocal as communities about the need for that to change? We all recently paid our federal tax bills. As individuals we tend to object to the bill closer to home - property taxes - despite the fact that we can see and value where and how that money is spent. Maybe we should work as communities on changing things nationally so that more of our overall tax money goes toward education and health care.