Letter to the Editor: Funding public education

By ANNA CLARE SHEPHERD

Editor,
When the school district administration and the teachers’ union are pitted against the school board and the district’s parents, everyone loses. When parents from one area are pitted against parents from another to fight over which schools to close, we all once again are losers. School districts have been left with too few dollars to fund vital needs for too long. They’ve been forced to make cut after cut after cut and we are at the bare bones now. We must stop the cuts. We need to turn to the cause of our problems: the legislature.
Public education in Utah is in grave danger: of losing teachers to higher paying jobs, of losing even more programs, of having class size raised precipitously, etc. It is also in danger of losing its fundamental building blocks: its local neighborhood schools. We need to stop the in-house fighting and band together for all Utah’s children.
We must ask our legislators to better fund public education and allow us to keep all our neighborhood schools open. We also need their help to protect educational programs, to pay higher teacher salaries, and to lower class size. We have surpluses in the State budget, yet Utah has the lowest per pupil spending in the nation. If our legislators can’t better fund public education, we should replace them. Legislators are expendable. Neighborhood public schools and Utah’s current and future young citizens are not. It’s time we all work together to save public education.