Quentin Walsh’s letter to the editor in the March 4 edition of the News generated a quick comment online at www.wwpinfo.com.
“Holy cow, Batman!” wrote one respondent. “This has to be a first having a WW-P Board of Ed member’s spouse encouraging the voting down of a budget. Imagine if a few more did this as well — first revolution in the Arab world, then Wisconsinites fighting for their rights in the streets and now WW-P board spouses challenging the status quo? I can’t wait for April!”
Noted another online visitor: “Mr. Walsh is bringing up an issue which has been out there for years. WW-P is running a surplus but cutting services and raising taxes. They don’t budget against actual spending but the previous budgets. No private sector business would get away with this. Where does the money go?
“Moreover, why is the WW-P Board of Education allowing administrators and unions to lock in sweet-heart packages just before legislation gets passed to protect the WW-P taxpayers?”
Ellen Walsh and Todd Hochman, the board members who voted against the budget, received an online greeting: “Thanks for your leadership. A petition should be started to convey the will of taxpayers that the accounting games must stop.”
The proposal for funding more solar energy installations in the district generated a rhetorical question online: “Is taking the $466,000 solar bait immediate gratification and short sightedness?” The answer: “While solar brings in $466,000, that is the immediate benefit but where does that leave us if the credits or rebates stop? There is a good possibility that the programs will be discontinued over the life of our debt terms as the state/country grapples with high debt. These programs tend to come and go.
“The immediate benefits are not due to solar’s high efficiency and ability to generate enough monster savings on its own; it’s largely from tax breaks and credits. You take out the government incentives and suddenly solar has very weak legs. Do a cost analysis with all the incentives and one without and see how that changes things.”
The High School South junior who submitted a letter urging that German not be deleted from the list of languages offered by the district got some online lecturing. “The utility of a language is not merely determined by its cultural history, it is constituted by factors culminating in real-world implementation,” wrote one online visitor.
“In terms of utility, the number of people speaking the language, and the dominance of the language, are the respectively greater figures in determining the importance of a language (not a culture.) 1025 million people speak Mandarin all over the world. 390 million people speak Spanish. Only 118 million people speak German.
“The question of what languages we should keep should be determined not on ‘cultural significance,’ which is incredibly biased, but on the number of speakers, as this will be the factor that will determine the influence of a language in the long-run. For this reason, the German program is the most objectionable of the languages offered in the district, and should be replaced by Arabic, Hindi, or Russian.”
Some in the online world took the WW-P News to task for failing to identify a letter writer as a supporter of the Princeton International Academy Charter School (PIACS). We plead no contest. E. J. Bliey wrote a letter questioning why WW-P did not take advantage of a state program that allows districts to fill available classroom space with out-of-district students and collect the tax money associated with those students.
The reference to PIACS touched off another firestorm about the charter school and prompted the following summary account:
“The simple truth is some parents want their kids to have immersion Chinese experience. They are currently paying for their kids by sending them to YingHua Day school, a private school. These parents are well educated and have found a clever way to pay for their private education with public dollars.”
