Rochester Cuts
Are Destructive

The Rochester School Board, under the advisement of the school Principal John Pojacik and Supt. Tim Mock, have decided that after several years of financial irresponsibility it was time to make things right again.

How would they do that? They put forth a budget proposal for the taxpayers that will cut their only music teacher, PE teacher and the IA teacher to 50%. They will also eliminate completely one of the two English teachers that they have at the secondary level. All of this destruction will save taxpayers a whopping two cents on the dollar.

While teachers in Rochester averaged a 1.9% pay increase at the last two contract negotiations, the superintendent and his staff were happily accepting pay increases ranging between 4-20%. (This year the special education coordinator for Windsor Northwest will be paid $80,000 if the budget is passed.)

What makes this so hard to understand is that for the past three or four years, the people taking these disproportionate raises have been hearing a lot of criticism from the taxpayers in this town for their financial irresponsibility.

If this budget passes, this is the end of the music program. There will be no more band program in Rochester. The Memorial Day Parade, graduation, winter and spring concerts, will all be a thing of the past.

Some readers who know me may say that I am only interested in this injustice because my wife, Carol, is one of the teachers slated for the cutting room floor. That would not only be very misleading, it would be dead wrong. I am a musician who has experienced a lifetime of fulfillment and satisfaction from the music education that I enjoyed as a student in elementary, junior high and high school.

Music has been the one constant in my life that I have been able to sustain me year after year. Denying kids the opportunity to learn an instrument or to sing in a chorus is unimaginable to all right-thinking people, not just the husbands of music teachers! A school, any school that is so willing to sacrifice music and to deny that experience to its children, is simply not worthy of calling itself a school. Period.

If that’s not enough to get you to defeat this budget on May 6, think about this. There will be only one English teacher in grades 8-12, the IA program will be a joke, and two teachers that have given more than 20 years of their lives to this community are being brushed off like dust.

Come to the town meeting on May 5 at 6 p.m. in the school auditorium and let your feelings be known and please vote to defeat this wrong minded, cynical budget on May 6. Show the principal, the superintendent and the board that you care about this town and the future of its children.

Neal Cronce

Rochester

(The author is a former teacher in Rochester.)