Pretty much everything that makes life worth living has been axed in the Wainscott School District as the result of two budget turndowns that, at worst, would have increased household taxes by around $20 a week, the cost of a bottle of wine.
Perry Duryea III said in a letter to the editor last week that he found the Wainscott taxpayers’ budgetary angst “dismaying and disturbing,” given the fact that it is one of the wealthier communities around. The district, whose kindergartners through third graders attend the school, and whose students in fourth grade and up go elsewhere, their tuition footed by Wainscott, was faced with an almost 50-percent budgetary increase this year owing largely to 20 students having recently moved there.
It sounds like a lot, but, at worst, the per-household increase would have equaled about half what I and my wife are paying, without complaint, in Springs. As Hugh King has said to me on occasion, “Somebody paid for your education. Now it’s your turn.”
So, no music, no art, no gym, no swimming lessons at the Y, no trips to the East Hampton library. . . .
To be fair, I should add that the budgets proposed for Wainscott were “approved,” but in each case not by the 60 percent supermajority that the state requires in cases where the 2-percent budget cap is pierced. It fell three votes shy of a supermajority in the May vote and 10 short in the June one, whose turnout of 146 was 10 fewer than May’s. Wainscott apparently is the sole school district on Long Island to be operating under a “contingency” budget. Dismaying and disturbing indeed.
There was talk in the wake of the votes of bringing back to the schoolhouse, “as a last resort,” the district’s fourth, fifth, and sixth graders, which reminded me of happy days I spent in a one-room school in Pittsburgh’s East End, not far from the Church of the Ascension where my mother worked. But that was long ago, and, come to think of it, we had no music, art, gym, or trips to the Carnegie Library. Bible passages mostly, for it was a Lutheran school, and I was pretty good at reciting them, insufferable as a matter of fact.
Our granddaughter, who graduated from the Springs School recently, ended a valedictory speech by saying “we are the future.”
Our future, I would say. And that’s why I think they’ve been shortsighted in Wainscott.