I tire of listening to the babbling of our educational bureaucracy as they study and re-study until they become so mired in hyperbole and gloom they are like a sleeping stork with its head buried in the sand.

Most students are ill-served by the present curriculum, they are fed watered-down math, science, English, geography and history (some of these courses are known by other names today) and are encouraged to pursue courses of study that lead to attendance at four liberal arts colleges. They are the neglected, misled, low self-esteem students who are left to wallow in an educational vacuum.

Some statistics: Approximately 48 percent of students who enter the University of Maine fail to complete their course of study. Why were they encouraged to attend? I suggest there is no challenging alternative course of study. These students are funneled. The university confirms this statistic by stating that the primary cause of this overwhelming drop-out rate is, very simply, lack of interest. It is unfortunate, in the extreme, that our public schools and their leaders are unaware and, therefore, unresponsive to educational needs that are so obvious to many outside education including, I am sure, many bored students.

Our Hancock County Technical School (formerly Boggy Brook Vocational School) has space for 125 students. There are approximately 65 attending. There should be a waiting list of 125 students wanting to attend. I have attended HCTS board meetings where a quorum is seldom mustered due to the neglect of feeder schools each trying to protect their educational bureaucracy at the expense of the student. It is also interesting to note that approximately 60 percent of students attending HCTS go on to further technical training. Vocational-technical training is a stepping stone to the future.

Our school systems need to rewrite curriculum to offer the neglected majority of their students an alternative technical education as an alternative to the watered down studies and low self-esteem. They are citizens of the future who will carry on building their communities, who will pay the taxes to support us old folks in retirement. We are asking them to do this with a poor bag of academic tools.

Gov. McKernan’s recently announced Youth Apprenticeship Program is a very positive step in the right direction. We need to support this type of meaningful, focused program. We need to support our students’ right to a meaningful education connected to the demands of highly skilled 20th century jobs where a secretary, machine tool operator, or bookkeeper must be a computer operator. Thomas D.C. Morris Morris Yachts Southwest Harbor