Newtown Needs An

Elected School Board

To The Editor:

The Board of Education seems surprised by the resounding defeat of the budget on April 22, and that is just the problem. With a horrible economy, unemployment in Newtown up 25 percent since 2000, and the town involved in a new property assessment, how could anyone in this town expect a budget with a 9.9 percent increase in education spending to pass?

Apparently, this Board of Education did. To call the Board of Ed out of touch and insulated from public opinion would be just the beginning.

Not elected, but selected, by a small group of political affiliates (the Democratic Town Committee and the Republican Town Committee), this board knows they answer to no one, until budget time.

And this time the town electors chose to give their opinion loudly and clearly and rejected the budget by a whopping 3 to 2 margin.

It is more than time for the members of the Board of Education to be elected in a fair and open election. More than time for our two major political parties to give the voters a chance and nominate more than one candidate for each open position.

In a review of six months of minutes of Board of Ed meetings, I could not find any motion that was not passed and passed unanimously. Unless the members of the Board of Ed have been breaking the law and meeting outside their scheduled meetings (which I doubt) one could hardly call the board a contemplative body.

It is time for the Board of Ed, and their respective Democratic and Republican town committees, to stop insulting our intelligence by telling us that they want to avoid politicizing the Board.

This country’s democracy was founded on the premise that politics (as in competing candidates and ideas) is good and essential to the survival of that democracy. We want politics. Because the opposite of a democracy is a dictatorship. That’s not what America stands for. As Tip O’Neill said, all politics are local. Locally, we deserve to elect our Board of Ed members, not have a small minority appoint them.

Sincerely,

Laura E. Lerman

55 Main Street, Newtown                                               April 29, 2003