A First Step Toward High School Expansion

Classes officially end for the 2006-2007 school year on Monday next week. On Tuesday, if you stand in the empty hallways at Newtown High School, you might just hear the building exhale in an exhausted groan. The high school building, as it is currently configured, is designed to accommodate 1,600 students each day, but this year daily enrollment topped 1,700. That is, by far, the largest crowd to assemble on a daily basis anywhere in Newtown. Getting them all packed in the building is the easy part. The real challenge has been to educate them once they are in there.

Graduation ceremonies for the NHS Class of 2007 showed us that Newtown is still meeting that challenge, but as with any overloaded system, the positive outcome becomes increasingly more dependent on good luck than prudent management and planning. Fortunately, Tuesday, June 26, is not only the first day of summer vacation for Newtown schools; it is also the date for a townwide referendum on taking the first step toward easing the overcrowding in our high school. The vote, from 6 am to 8 pm at Newtown Middle School, will seek voter approval of a $2.75 million appropriation to pay for preliminary architectural and engineering work for a high school expansion. This would be the first phase of a project ultimately expected to cost $41 million, and we urge Newtown voters to support it.

One of the canards perpetrated in the recent battle over the town’s 2007-2008 budget was that passage of the budget would somehow divert spending from educational needs, such as the high school expansion, to a palatial town hall at Fairfield Hills. For all those people who may have believed that assertion, the appropriation up for approval on Tuesday is aimed directly at education in Newtown. The only thing that will divert it will be a lack of public interest or support. Now is your chance to follow through on that wish for more local support for education. Don’t miss it.

For those who take the contrary view that Newtown’s system of public education is overly generous, if not downright wasteful, we invite you to take a closer look at public education — not as it was “back in the day,” but as it is now. Local school enrollments have grown in the past 20 years as they have never grown before. A school that does not have enough classrooms, that has a media/library center unable to serve all those who wish to use it, that does not have enough seats in the cafeteria, is a school where “educational opportunity” becomes a mere slogan useful only for papering over a reality of inadequacy.

Newtown now spends $63 million a year on education and stretches each one of those dollars farther that most other towns in Connecticut. By almost any measure — scholastic testing, college admissions, personal achievements — graduates of Newtown’s school system present convincing evidence that this is a town that still values and delivers educational excellence. Through apathy or wishful thinking or just a negative view of government in general, we can, in time, completely change that reality — and still be spending $63 million a year. Now, that would truly be a waste of money.