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The Spencer – Van Etten school district is a constant reminder of what is wrong with our educational system. If our school system were a business that had competition, it would have been out of business years ago; no business devoid of quality control or financial responsibility can survive, the way schools apparently can. Yet, we are still urged to vote to give this broken system even more money. Our district has been on the NY State worst schools list called "schools in need of improvement" twice since 2002 So many parents have pulled their children out that enrollment has shrunk 13% in 6 years. More people would have pulled their kids out of the school district, had the truth not been so successfully suppressed. According to the state website with mandated test results, an average of 54% of our eighth graders have outright failed the state English test during the past ten years. Test links to the state website are available at www. langstedt.com When the state mandated tests showed that the district failed year after year, the information was not publicized by the district. Instead, the school bureaucracy bragged about our "great" graduation rate. What was the reason for this "success"? The school board had reduced our graduation requirements to below the state standard, making our requirements the lowest in the State.

You might ask how come you have not heard about the mess before? There are two reasons. First you have the propaganda put out by the district which conceals their failures. When I was on the board I sometimes exposed some of the lies perpetuated in the district’s propaganda rag "The Panther Periodical, " Considering the accuracy of the content a more descriptive name for the rag would be "Panther Droppings."

The second reason is the deception in the budget process. Remember last year’s budget letter that came to every home? To get people to vote for the budget, superintendent Schoonmaker guaranteed, "More specifically, any increases in the tax levy will be limited to no more than 1.72%." After the voters were thus fooled into passing the budget, the actual tax increase was raised to 6.6%.