At last Tuesday’s school board meeting my wife asked whether the Elm Street school building could receive a coat of paint (paint has been stripped and the bare wood left that way — an ugly sight for school children and area residents).

Board member Shapiro, in an outburst of rage, snapped back that 10 percent of the maintenance budget had been spent on one side of the building in response to the request of some taxpayers who complained about the condition of the building. Teachers in the audience clapped furiously in approval of his response.

Why? The teachers want all budget money spent on their salaries, not on maintenance needs.

If, in a $5.7 million (last year’s) budget there is no money to take care of a historic landmark building, look at the real cause: a bloated budget due to overpopulation of teachers hired by school boards in the pocket of a superintendent who, during his 16-year tenure, stated (once to my wife when she was on the board) that he would not be happy until the pupil-teacher ratio was one-to-one. (And she thought he was kidding?)

One has only to take a look at the relatively superior school work of SAD 28 students 15 years ago, when the pupil-teacher ratio was 30-1, compared to the mediocre work of students in 1990, when the pupil-teacher ratio is 19-1 (plus many teacher aides), to see how royally the taxpayer is being taken to the cleaners.

And, for those who point to superior test scores as a reliable measure of district quality, remember that teachers teach more and more to the tests and the tests themselves have been dumbed down to match the dumbed-down curriculum…. Jan Iserbyt Camden