By Richard Wolf, Guest Commentary

Once again the readers of the Savage Pacer have been subjected to another tirade on taxes in the “Community Voices” column of the May 31 edition by Robert Thibodeaux.  Mr. Thibodeaux’s commentary contains many innuendos, half truths and outright falsehoods that need to be corrected. 

He would like you to believe the Prior Lake-Savage Area School Board goes about the budgeting process without thoughtful consideration to the cost and benefit of each program. This is just plain false. His solution for the district would be for the board to find some mysterious amount of money in the budget that does nothing to add to a student’s academic achievement and cut that and then things could continue on as before but at a lower cost without affecting the academic experience of the students. If this were the business world, and if students were widgets where everyone is the same that might be true. 

But fortunately, people are not widgets. Each student is unique and requires different experiences and opportunities to fulfill their potential and all the cuts in the past have had an impact on the experiences and opportunities of the students.

He also accuses the School Board of having no plan on how or where money is to be spent. Nothing could be further from the truth. Like any real world business, the Prior Lake-Savage Area School District has a fully-developed strategic plan that all academic and business decisions made against. The objective goals are listed with plans to achieve those objectives along with the results already achieved. It is all right there on the district’s Web site.

Under this umbrella of objectives and plans, the budget process for the last three years has taken place. He would have you believe that all the School Board does during its budget-cutting process is just skim some money off the top without any thought or due diligence with the idea they will just get it back in the future. This is incorrect and false.

These parameters used during the budget cutting process, also readily available from the district, include items such as all decisions are made based on student achievement and budget integrity, district cuts should be looked at first and additional cuts should be found at the site level, and curricular activity is valued higher then co-curricular activities. These processes have had an extraordinary amount of public comment. Administrators, staff, parents and community volunteers spend multiple hours in order to make the sure the cuts have the least effect on the student’s in classroom education. 

Obviously, Mr. Thibodeaux has not been present during these meetings to listen to concerned parents and others express their opinion on how budget cutting will affect their children’s educational experience, whether it involves laying of the district personnel, not adding teachers to lower class size, not adding paraprofessionals to help kid’s with special needs or to cutting band and middle school sports. The School Board takes seriously the balancing act that must occur between the economic concerns of the resident’s versus the needs of all the students. The School Board has made the necessary decisions in an honest and forthright manner that they were elected to do. 

Budget meetings can be long, sometimes boring, and not very fun. Democracy is difficult and depends on people showing up to discuss and debate conflicting ideas. What is great about America is you can show up to influence those decisions, but what is also great is no one forces to show up. So Mr. Thibodeaux, you can to continue to comment without attending meetings, but if you’re going to comment, you should at least have your facts straight.

 (Richard Wolf is a resident of Savage. Guest commentaries are one of several opinion and commentary pieces appearing regularly in this newspaper.