I went to my first school budget meeting the year we registered my daughter for kindergarten in Worcester. Our neighborhood elementary school was among the four being closed that year.
When she registers for classes for her senior year later this spring, I’m wondering if her Worcester high school will have the classes she needs to graduate.
In the intervening years, we’ve lost classroom aides and secretaries; we’ve cut programs and languages; we’ve retrenched and rebudgeted every single year. For public schools in Massachusetts, the costs of educating students tend to rise by about 3 percent each year; in Worcester and other districts like Worcester, increased funding, if it comes at all, never meets the cost of educating the children in the city. This leaves a budget that educates 26,000 students nearly $100 million short a year.
My children and their classmates have never attended an elementary school with a full-time school librarian. They have never had enough support staff for the needs of their classmates. They have started the year with substitutes. They have dodged raindrops from the ceiling, ignored the clocks that don’t work, shared books and computers and pens and crayons.