” Sure, our BOE probably overspends by $25-35 mm just here in Ridgewood alone. Just look at all of the virtually empty buses taking one or two students a few miles every day back and forth… and we’re a magnet for special needs kids because of all of the resources in our $111 mm BOE budget dedicated to special needs resources. While that’s great, what about the other 5,000 kids in our public schools who rank 23rd in SAT scores for the state? And don’t have statistically significant acceptance rates to top colleges & universities? From a high school most recently ranked 26th in the state with a declining trend now for years? #ChangeStartsAtTheTop #MommiesWontVoteNo #NotGettingOurMoneysWorth “
So we vote no, then they will eliminate school buses, eliminate special needs kids and we save 35 million and our schools go up from top 5% to top 1%. So simple, why didn’t we do that sooner?
Vote no.
As I have commented before, Ridgewood schools attract people from all over the country, esp. autistic students. My new neighbor from Alabama told me that they came here after seeing on the computer that Ridgewood had an excellent program for Autistic children. I know of 2 others who moved into our neighborhood for the same reason. I am sure there are others as we have a good number of school buses coming onto the block. The main problem is that our schools are forced to spend so much money on disabled children that they have had to cut back on so much that made our schools great in the past. But even a bigger problem than that is the schools no longer split children according to their ability. That means the faster learners can sit, bored for days, until the others catch up. (Several mothers told me that this is why they finally sent their children to private schools.) The school system no longer offers Gifted and Talented programs. Basically our educational system tends toward the medium student and this automatically will cause our schools to be lowered in any academic ratings. I have no idea as to a solution for this but as long as this is the way our schools are tending we will continually decline in academic stature.