The following letter is my personal opinion as a parent, taxpayer, resident, and school board member. It is not necessarily the opinion of the Whitingham School Board.
When the petition was circulated to Whitingham voters, it was promoted for several reasons. Several of these reasons have turned out to be misrepresentations of fact, as we have all since learned.
First was that it would save the taxpayers money. A fair and impartial estimation of those costs was done by one of the proponents of the petition, Cheree Dix, with the aid of Ronda Lackey, the school district’s business manager. Ronda is well known for her impartiality and ability to give facts. What they discovered was that if you kept a comparable program it would cost more to dissolve the Twin Valley Middle/High School and educate just our elementary. Cheree did find a way to keep costs level: simply cut out industrial arts, consumer science, foreign language, and a reduction of other programs.
Second was school choice. School choice is not a bad concept until you look at the economics of it. If you, as an individual, have school choice and everyone else doesn’t, it works out quite well. But, if everyone has choice it makes your local school too expensive to run. We would end up paying for the students to go out of district and then if the high school were to remain, the cost per student would rise proportionately. This cost hasn’t even been considered. It is more likely that the remaining high school would have to cut programs so drastically that it wouldn’t survive.
Third, the petition was promoted as a way to return to those wonderful days of yesteryear. Having a K through 12 system in Whitingham was a great system when we had 200 high school students and before Act 60. Times have changed. With 55 students and Act 60, the possibility isn’t even remotely feasible.
Fourth, the statement has been made that by voting to end the Twin Valley School District, you will be voting to keep Whitingham’s elementary in Whitingham. This is like saying that you should divorce your spouse so you won’t have any more kids. The proposal by the facilities committee is just that, a proposal. First, this proposal needs to be further investigated to see if it makes sense. Part of that decision is seeing whether Whitingham’s parents would support the idea of sending their elementary students out of town. Second would be a period of negotiation followed by a vote of Whitingham residents. Voters would have to approve any such merger.
The Twin Valley Middle/High School was formed five years ago in order to bring an education that was superior to the one that each town was able to do on its own. Twin Valley High School has much to offer and to date in has proven very successful. Previously Whitingham and Wilmington were very limited in their high school offerings.TVHS has many more course offerings. We have managed to provide this while keeping our average yearly tax increase over those same five years to under 2.3%, saving taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Is our high school perfect? Of course not, no school is, including the schools that are being proposed as alternatives. But, we have a good solid start and our high school continues to improve each year.
One of the chief reasons that one parent promoting the breakup has cited was that the curriculum was not to her liking. This same parent has never approached either the Twin Valley administration or the school board with her concerns.
It seems to me that one’s efforts, especially as a school board member, would be best spent working to improve our school system rather than tearing it apart.
Ed Metcalfe, vice chair, Whitingham School Board
Whitingham
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