The Millinocket School Budget: Does it Make Sense?

Bad times have come upon the Millinocket area, and they didn’t just start when the mills closed in late December.

When my wife and I moved here two years ago, we bought our house for a total cost far less than we had intended as a down payment. At least nineteen houses on our street alone display for sale signs, and others have seemingly been abandoned with no hope of a sale. These signs were there before the mills closed.

We live in a beautiful area. We are from away, but my wife and I intend to make this our home for the rest of our lives.

Millinocket is a wonderful place to live, but we must realize that this is a depressed area, and that it has been long before the mills closed.

With that in mind, I have been looking over the 2003 school budget, and comparing it to the town budget.

I’m not a financial analyst or even a math major, but in looking over the 2003 school budget, there is one question that comes to mind.

Why?

Why are we throwing so much money into the public school system?

Can we afford it?

Okay, so that’s two questions. I told you I wasn’t a math major. There’ll probably be more, but let’s look at the ones I’ve already put before us before we go on.

First, let me say that I’m not one of those people who thinks we should abolish the public school system. Sometimes I do think that, but for the most part I realize that this would be a radical solution, and not one that I am proposing now.

Nor do I resent the fairly large amount of money that goes into teacher’s salaries.

Teachers teach kids. Teaching kids is good; providing, of course, that they teach kids good.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve heard a lot of complaints about the Millinocket schools, and I’ve had a few of my own, but I can’t think of a single complaint about one of the teachers. In fact, those teachers that I am familiar with are excellent and well worth every dollar we give them in wages.

Teachers are the only people in the school who do what schools were intended to do, which is to teach kids, so before we talk about cutting teachers, let’s take a look at those who do not teach kids. That’s where we will find the waste. Let’s look at it.

That’s more than $500,000 in administrative salaries, for one year, for a school system that has only three schools in two buildings. Why?

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