By Thom Trybus Santa Monica
With all the genuine concern these days about various budget shortfalls due to recent cuts by the Davis administration, most notably on the part of local educators, who say that elimination of programs and services for resident grade school students is sure to be necessary, I wonder how these educators can justify continuing to fund and offer programs to non-resident adults, such as “English as a second language” and “Preparation for a G.E.D.” or "Immigration assistance" all provided absolutely free to (outside adults) at certain school locations in the Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District?
Ought not those type of non-essential programs be the first to be eliminated when the budget monies start to dry up? Are all of the adult recipients of these overly generous school programs and services completely unable to pay for at least a portion of the cost of them? Or are they just taking advantage of “traditional” expensive local school pork projects which someone long ago (in a better financial climate no doubt) envisioned as a way to help beef up the local school budget, create yet another reason (of all the various reasons to date) to request more and more precious and increasingly scarce public funding, and thus in effect committing more precious teaching time better spent on local resident grade school students than to any special interest class such as the aforementioned adults. Will the new president and vice president of the school board be expected to cut and trim such programs that exist, or expand on them whether they are locally popular or not?
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 17, 2002. Read the original PDF.