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Find the money for reading program elsewhere

July 02, 2009 17:07

I have been noticing a significant amount of conflict about the spending cuts required by the Simcoe County District School Board because of an annual decline in enrolment.

The Toy Manufacturers of America had forecasted these demographics in the early 90s. Why the delay and why is it such a time-sensitive issue? If the cuts are necessary, the board owes it to its students and teachers to do so.

Society as a whole always preys on the weakest members in our culture. Cutting the Grade 1 Reading Recovery Program is, in my opinion, going to cause great strain and difficulties on our social and criminal systems in approximately a decade.

Most of the board members and trustees will not hold their positions at that time. In my day it was called "slipping through the cracks."

In 2007, through a chain of events, my wife and I were invited to attend a Reading Recovery Program demonstration in Barrie. We watched through a one-way glass window. Kathleen Roth (a teacher at Connaught Public School in Collingwood) was the reading specialist who performed the demonstration. It was an intense and very focused program. The goal was the task at hand, learning to read.

Try telling a parent "your kid can't read, but all of our funding was cut, so things have to stay that way."

These are very well educated people making the cuts. A very frightening picture indeed. Perhaps I'm missing something. It seems to be a paradox. Cut education to save education? Yes, a simple, but well-informed summary.

In my opinion an efficiency expert (from a business standpoint) will obviously want to cut this program, because the children will cause the least amount of backlash and within a couple of years nobody will even know that the program ever existed. The books will balance, but from an education standpoint it's not the answer.

There seems to be a quite substantial amount of dialogue about the new schools that the board is wishing to build. Give any builder or engineer a pencil and a piece of paper. In a very short time, between the architecture and the landscape design they will have all of the money necessary to save any and all education these very well educated people wish to delete.

The kids wouldn't even have to share textbooks.

The program works. Find the money somewhere else.

J. Hyndman,
Collingwood

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