I have not really been paying attention to the activities of Westerly and Chariho over the past month. We’re in the worst recession since the Great Depression, election season is in full swing and the fate of our nation may be in the balance. So the banal politics and personalities of Southern Rhode Island have not been in the forefront of my mind.
But the Chariho Bond is still out there and quickly approaching. So what to do? I’m not sure. A couple months ago I would have said, “vote for the biggest of the three line items and let the other two die”. I’d rather not see any of them pass but it looks like Charlestown will try and leave the district unless they have a financial liability preventing them from doing so. I don’t like Chariho for a lot of reasons: It’s too expensive, it has too many administrators, it has a crappy math curriculum, we pay our teachers excessive salaries (and don’t get the test results to justify the salaries) and most recently, I have learned of the “responsive classroom”- which, as far as I can tell, is a total load of crap.
But it is a lot more expensive to chop the district into 3 separate districts. Despite this, things are different now than they were 2 months ago. Yes, the Dow jumped 900 points today. But it lost almost 2000 points last week? And it can easily turn on a dime. And just because the Dow is up, that doesn’t help the rest of the economy. State revenues are down significantly, Rhode Island has an additional $33 million debt because of it. And we are looking at the biggest Federal deficit of all time.
Put simply, times are hard and money is scarce. Can we really afford any of these bonds? Can we really afford the school district we already have? Will Charlestown even vote for the bonds?
We are at a crossroads and frankly, I just don’t know which strategy will pay off.
