Limiting options does not help

To the editor:

When I went to South Whidbey High School, there was talk of discouraging kids from doing Running Start because it allowed money to go other places other than the local school district.

This didn’t make sense then, and similarly what is going on at Bayview right now doesn’t make sense. Why limit the options for our children? Why not give them the best chance at succeeding by letting the money flow to where the kids are?

Bayview is the only school in the district with increasing enrollment. Cutting resources and teacher’s time (no matter what the budget) from Bayview is not meeting the need there. Letting the director (who was recently voted teacher of the year!) resign under duress and protest, is not meeting the needs of the school or the kids in the school district.

Only a few of the people making decisions for and about Bayview have ever been to the school and only a handful of times. None of their children go or have been to Bayview.

This top-down, blind approach invites and, indeed, breeds ignorance and misunderstanding.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to see what is going on, what the perspective is and what role and purpose Bayview serves without actually trying to understand it and actually going there and observing what goes on there.

Fred McCarthy was recently asked something to the effect of: What do you see Bayview’s role in the school district as being? His answer of, “I don’t know,” was telling. Of course he doesn’t, because he hasn’t ever been there. How could he know?

So why, then, do they have the audacity to make unilateral decisions for Bayview and the students that go there?

The budget is what it is. One way or another, we do have the money for the students that actually exist in our district. Limiting those students’ options and making a viable alternative less available to them for next year makes no sense, no matter how you choose to look at things.

It is time for the people in charge of the budget to stop their unilateral, top-down approach and make an attempt at seeing what the needs of the students they serve are. They need to look at what the kids are actually doing, where they are going, why they are going there and what their experience is.

Whether it is Running Start, or Bayview, or whatever, limiting options by cutting services where the kids actually are is bad policy — especially when done in ignorance.

Andrew Neff

Clinton