Bonjour. Got French

Bonjour, comment ca va? Got French? We Don’t. Perhaps you have seen that statement on t-shirts worn mostly by Marietta High School students the past few years.
I reflected on the French deficiency statement Monday evening on the heels of observations by a young man who confessed that until the very end of the meeting he did not get the connection between new buildings and improved education. In part it was because he had not thought about how we are forced to spend our money on our old buildings.
Increasing costs combined with steady to declining cash flows make us do some things that don’t make sense in a modern educational setting. We continue to erode our education base to pay other bills at our student’s peril.
What have we lost besides French? Too much, really. Here are just a few of our losses.
At the middle school we have classes of 30 plus students. Some in science labs where there is not enough equipment. We no longer offer a semester of French or Spanish at the middle school.
We have crammed Language Arts and Reading classes into shorter periods rather than we used to have. Both are skills fundamental to long-term scholastic and life success.
At the high school we dropped word processing as a graduation requirement; dropped our business classes, German classes and American Sign Language. Not to mention what in my day we called Home Economics. Though that is still available at the Career Center.
There are a number of electives we no longer offer thanks to cuts in staffing to save money and pay other operating costs. As a result, many Juniors and Seniors have most or all of their basic course requirements met with few other classes to choose from to enrich their experience and prepare them for life or further education.
One parent told me of her college freshman son who just dropped a course because he was ill prepared compared to other students. He was falling behind. Yet there was no course pre-requisite. It was assumed high school had prepared him to take the course. Ours had not.
We have teachers doing lunchroom duty and monitoring parking lots because we can’t afford both an aide and a teacher as the teacher must be available for classes during other periods. We have fewer nurses than buildings. As a result, some kids are left without nursing service as the staff travels and works at other buildings.
As the young man discovered Monday, we are forced to make hard choices between what we must pay and what we should offer. We have to pay the heat bill. We do not have to teach French. We have to patch a roof. We are not required to expand our computer class offerings.
Let’s not even talk about our building security and the costs to bring it up to date in the old buildings that were designed to be open and welcoming gathering places. Times have changed. The buildings have not.
It has been calculated based on modern building design and experience in other districts that our new building operations will save a minimum of a half million dollars per year. Probably much more. Money that can be used to restore programs we have lost. Money that can bring us into the 21st century. The trick is getting there.
You can help by learning more. Go to www.buildmariettaschools.com. Come to an information meeting on either of the next two Mondays. The 12th at Marietta College McDonough Center. The 19th at the high school auditorium. Both at 7 PM. Au revoir.