Our Island Family Life

After I posted all those links yesterday about our school and all the improvements we have done for it, today I got a link in my email about the city thinking of closing our school. Our island school has been very proactive. Things like our computers, ipad, smart board, green house, even supplies like tissues and writing utensils have been provided by grants we have submitted for ourselves, donations and fundraising. Our school even won an award for using the lowest amount electricity in the state. Now before you say, "well, you are a tiny school so...", this was calculated out by previous usage and other math stuff to be fair for all schools. We have to supply our own drinking water after the well became contaminated and it is volunteers not the school budget that is paying to have it taken care of. Basically, our island pays the highest taxes for the city due to all the waterfront or water view homes and we get pretty much zip in return. We are lucky to get the salaries for employees here. One teacher, one Ed Tech, one custodian and one sanitation/road works person. It costs $120,000 to have our school. We pay over $350,000 in taxes. Most of the school costs are the teachers salaries and the custodian. We pay for our own building maintenance except the cleaning. We don't add to food costs since we have no school lunch program, the city pays for the building insurance. The PTC paid for our heating, siding, playground (with a grant) and replacement windows. We should be getting more not less. The whole island gets less than the rest of the city. We have talked of leaving the city before but with only about 60 of us here year round it would be tough. I would like to though to see the city lose a huge chunk of taxes then see how they like it. We still have dirt roads here (which we like) and yet have to every year get more and more regulated by the city. They want us to have street signs now and we recently had to start paying for registrations for our golf carts (more money to the city). No wonder the city runs out of money. Anyway, I am just ranting. If they try and close the school we may just go private. We have talked about it before as a backup plan to the city closing the school. We will be having four kids coming into the school over the next few years and there are five in there now. The school has gone down to one student before and that was really bad, around 15 years ago. One of the other island schools our school communicates to only has two students and they are brothers. A constant struggle for a disappearing way of life. So sad. I understand the need to cut costs but we pay our way for our school and then some.