Found Money

After successfully passing its first tax increase in a decade, the Matawan-Aberdeen School District was delighted to learn it was the proud recipient of an additional $584,217 in state aid.

The district’s senior administrators quickly huddled to determine how to best spend the money. After all, the thinking goes, why should the money go to waste as tax relief during a labor and housing crisis when the school district could put it to good use.

And what was their master plan? Buying books. Lots and lots of books. Why? Because studies show that the mere presence of books in a room magically improves literacy rates among youngsters.

How does that work? I’m glad you asked. You see, according to this theory, kids are tired of watching TV, playing video games, chatting online or texting friends, and surfing the web. No, what children really want to do is curl up in bed with a good read. But they can’t because the school library doesn’t have any good books and Mommy and Daddy won’t take them to the public library. So, against their better judgment, kids have no alternative to social networking and mind numbing entertainment.

According to this theory, given the choice between Grand Theft Auto and Lord of the Flies, children will naturally be drawn to the latter.

Moreover, this investment will be a one-shot deal without any future maintenance costs. These heavily used books will forever remain in pristine condition, they’ll never get lost or lose their popularity, the teachers will maintain impeccable records, and the district will never need to purchase new books since all the great ones have already been written.

This program is critical to the district’s mission of educating our students. It’s so important, that only a few programs rank higher in priority, such as inflating our bloated staff.

If we outsourced the transportation department and sold our buses, we’d save $650,000 the first year and $250,000 a year after that. But the district’s commitment to their bus drivers is far more important than children’s literacy or tax relief. There’s the quarter-million plus spent a year on Reading Recovery, a program even the US Deptartment of Education has determined harmful to students, that’s also more important than literacy and tax relief. Or the $60,000 spent a year to keep teacher aides on state pension rolls. Or $600,000 on athletics, $300,000 on school clubs, and $300,000 on school lunch aides,

Yup, literacy is the most important thing excluding all of the above.

And if we really want kids to read, we need books. The old fashioned kind. You know, the ones made of paper that sometimes get bent or torn or lost. That’s real reading. Not these new-fangled Kindles. We can’t allow our children to read Shakespeare for free on a Kindle when we can break their backs with 20-pound backpacks. After all, we don’t want our kids becoming sissies.

However, in the event the school board chooses to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into a literacy program, may I suggest an alternative?

Let’s require every 3rd – 12th grade student to own a Kindle and have a library card. The school will subsidize the cost so that the student will only need to pay $50. (Kids getting free meals would get additional discounts but never free. Families need to invest in literacy as well.) Then coordinate with the local library to provide e-books for downloading over the internet. Most of the classics are free. For modern books, the library could set aside $50,000 its first year and then $5,000 each succeeding year to build an enormous online library with no need to expand shelf space or personnel. (Seeing as how the library can afford to give the Matawan and Aberdeen municipalities about $375,000 a year, it can certainly afford the small sums to build an online library.)

Such a program would cost the district about $150,000 to launch and $15,000 -20,000 a year to maintain. (Costs should drop as the Kindle price drops.) The library would once again be part of communal life and have an extraordinarily expansive collection, particularly if this program could be coordinated through all the Monmouth County libraries.

At best, our kids will be reading. At worst, we’ll have saved a couple hundred thousand dollars from a misguided program and our kids will have Kindles. Or we could just let the taxpayers keep their money. >>> Read more!