Teresa Thiel: Coming to Grips with Tradeoffs

Discussion topic for week of March 12
The topic this week is trade-offs, specifically the ones that will be necessary in any restructuring of the Oshkosh school system. We asked the candidates to respond to this statement:"Clearly restructuring is an issue that Oshkosh has had trouble coming to grips with. The change is almost certain to require trade-offs. What are the trade-offs that you think the community should be considering and should be willing to accept?"

I think some of the trade-offs in the restructuring will be giving up small neighborhood schools that are inefficient to operate for larger schools that are more efficient to operate and that will have more full time staff --- most of the remaining elementary schools will have full-time at their school a phy-ed, music, and art teachers and a full-time counselor (which I think will be especially valuable -- I remember times at Jefferson when a child was in crisis and we had to call over to another school, locate the guidance counselor and have her come to Jefferson to help the child --- which could take an hour or more for the counselor to arrive -- that is a long time for a child in crisis to wait). The larger schools will also allow most special education students to attend school in their home attendance area with their siblings and neighbors (1 in 6 children in our school system have special education needs). Another trade off will be students going to the school they have always gone to for more students being taught in SAGE classrooms, this is a huge educational benefit for students. Another trade-off will be saying good-bye to schools we love but that are 80 to 100 years old (the lifespan of a well maintained school building) for building that still have 30 or more years of life in them.

If we close 6 schools it is projected that we will save $1.5 million in operating costs EVERY year (the figure will go up due to inflation) but what many who focus on that number fail to recognize is that we will also SAVE a significant amount of money (you can total it up by going to this link) in needed maintenance and repairs -- unless of course you want to keep all our schools but not maintain them. While the deferred maintenance would be a one-time savings, you will also have ongoing maintenance and preventive maintenance costs for every building you keep, the more buildings you keep the more dollars you need to spend on maintenance and since there isn't an overabundance of dollars you will have to cut staff or programs to pay for the ongoing building maintenance.

Closing schools is difficult and for many heart-wrenching, I'm a mom, I know how sad it would be to have your child's school close, but the board needs to look out for ALL children, and spend our dollars in the most efficient way possible. Keeping schools that will not last another 25 years and that do not meet today's educational needs and never will, because people are upset that schools will close is not being fiscally or educationally responsible. We have to be willing to make the difficult decisions that will leave our district better off financially as well as educationally as we look to the future. I think that is a trade-off worth accepting. Remember, if we close no schools, we will still need a referendum to do "catch-up maintenance" but we will have NO operational savings to off-set that cost and we will have continuing maintenance costs for those old buildings well into the future, that must be factored into the cost of NOT closing buildings. That is not a trade-off I'm willing to accept.