One of the events of Kuntz Days in Ridgeway was the “tour” of Ridgeway Elementary School. The description on the flyer was “A discussion of the future of our school.” As I walked to the school, I thought that this would be about drumming up support for a millage election or an introduction to some refurbishing plans and a plea for donations.
Instead, I arrived in the school’s lobby and found…nothing. The lights were off. The classroom doors were open, showing vast expanses of bare linoleum. In the lobby sat an old man dressed in a black and gold garrison cap and a matching windbreaker. He talked with the people in front of me about how he thought the school building could be made into apartments. Then the people in front of me walked into the school, and I followed them.
A little girl in the crowd had apparently gone to the school, and from what I picked up the school had been closed down the year before. Her parents and relatives all asked her what had been in each classroom, and to hear her remembering who had taught what class in what room was kind of heartbreaking. She had obviously had some good memories in this place, and now it was abandoned.
Before closing down the school, the people in charge had taken all the equipment they deemed necessary. Whiteboards had been removed from the blackboards, leaving evenly spaced circular pockmarks of adhesive, and most rooms had nothing in them. One had an old wooden desk that would have been considered old in the 1970s, and there was one classroom with a few chairs thrown in the center, as though they had been grouped together and forgotten.
Then I got to the library, and I started to get mad.
You could tell it was the library for two reasons. The first was because of the shelves in the room. The second was because the books were still in them. Stacks and stacks of children’s books, gathering dust in an abandoned school building, for some reason considered less important to take than tables and chairs. I was incredulous. How could they just let the books rot here? Couldn’t they have donated them to a library or sold them or even given the things away to children who could have gotten some use out of them? But no, they just sat there, waiting in vain for some child to pick them up and discover the worlds they contained.
I have by and large tried to keep from putting my personal opinions in this blog. I have tried really hard, because this blog is supposed to be about the interesting , wonderful and occasionally ridiculous things that go on in this little corner of the United States, but I have to say something here. In 2010, the Department of Defense received 705 billion dollars to keep functioning. That’s about 20% of the Federal Government’s budget. Education, on the other hand, nets a whopping 3% of the government’s budget. According to the Department of Education’s website, about 10.8% of each state’s education is funded by the Federal government. The rest comes from the individual state.
With this recession, Congress has talked an awful lot about needing to cut programs, especially programs like social security, Medicare and Medicaid. To be fair, about 20% of the U.S. budget goes to Social Security, and 21% goes to Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP. But with all the screaming politicians have done about us needing to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, along with everything else, the Defense and Security budget remains untouched. Because, after all, we are surrounded by big scary enemies lurking out in the world who are going to kill us if we take so much as a five spot from the Defense budget. Meanwhile, schools across the country are being closed due to lack of funding.
If you look at the more successful dictatorships in human history, you might notice they have two main strategies for controlling the population. Keep them scared, and keep them stupid.
Draw your own conclusions.
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