After reading Earle Willey’s letter I began to think about how the older generation sees the expenses of today’s school operations. While I don’t agree with Willey about school expenditures, I do respect his opinions. Here are some of my opinions on his view points:

“There are already too many people in this area that are unemployed and can’t afford to pay for the district.” My response to that is the fact that a levy failure would cause a great surge in the unemployment rate of Kitsap County. Twenty percent of the district’s budget would be slashed, which translates to a lot of jobs.

Willey mentioned the large amount of expenditures on the school building and athletic fields. The people of the North Kitsap School District voted on a bond measure that paid for all of these much needed renovations. These expenditures in no way came out of the general fund (or levy funds). These expenses came out of the capital budget that was funded solely by the bond measure. Furthermore over the past eight years the district has been forced to steadily cut their budget, and along with those cuts a lot of the “frills” are gone. The cuts that remain are getting extremely painful for the day-to-day operations of the district.

First of all, athletics are responsible for keeping many kids in school and achieving the mandated level of academic success in order to participate. I personally know of about 25 kids who wouldn’t have interest in academics if it weren’t for sports.

Much of the sports equipment is purchased by athletic boosters and the ASB, and not out of the general budget of the school district.

Let us be honest about the cost of education in the 20s and 30s in comparison to the cost of education today. For example, computers weren’t even a dream back then, and while computers are getting cheaper, the number of computers needed to run a school district in this day and age is astronomical.

Unfortunately many school districts still struggle to maintain computers at a level that is conducive to teaching students about the current technologies.

In the 20s and 30s school districts didn’t have as many state and federal mandates that they needed to meet. Unfortunately many of these mandates aren’t funded either, which puts many district in a pickle from year to year. Until the state and federal government learn that they need to provide funding for their mandates, school districts in this country will always be hurting for money.

Until this state figures out where education funding went awry and fixes it, school districts will need to continue to ask for community support just to offer a general education that is required for our students to be successful in today’s society.

Thank you, Willey, for your service and your points of view. I am completely in favor of teaching through adversity, I just don’t think we should make decisions to purposely create hurdles and setbacks for our youth.

Mark VanHuis

Poulsbo