Spending Tax Dollars 101
Stratford public schools open for business on Thursday. Unlike any business, however, there is no BOE budget. None. The Board of Education has decided that parents, teachers, students and, oh yeah, taxpayers have no need to know how half of the tax revenue of the Town will be spent. Not a single elected member of the Board of Education or Town Council can provide any information regarding an actual budget or even whether or not one exists. This is astounding, if not illegal.
One would think that a primary function of an elected government would be to, at the very least, explain how the money they are demanding will be spent. The BOE is not a privately held corporation. It may be administered by a non-elected superintendent, but that does not relieve the BOE of the obligation to provide this information to the public. Why do we need to explain this? Apparently because the members of the Board of Education have forgotten this.
This is as bad as stealing $5.6 million from the WPCA. Hold on….maybe it’s worse. We have no idea what the BOE will do with somewhere between $97 – $101 million of our money. It makes Harkins move to extract $5.6 million from the WPCA look like petty theft.
