Living in New Canaan has opened up my eyes to the amounts of opportunity that are handed to us students on a silver platter. With having the number one public school system in Fairfield County and being in the top five high schools in the country, we still have our faults. Although we have smart boards and high standardized test scores, that doesn’t mean that the students themselves are truly and intelligently smart. Of course a great deal of the students in New Canaan Public Schools are bright kids, but there is another great deal of the students that are tutored for SAT, ACT, AP tests, SAT subject tests, and school in general. My favorite excuse is that the kids don’t have enough time to study because of their sport after school. When it comes down to the important things in a highschooler’s life, are sports one of them? If they can get a scholarship to college, then obviously it is on the top of the priority list, but if they are sitting on the bench for the entire game, then they need to rethink their priorities. If these kids aren’t grateful for the education that they are given or using the technologies in the school to their advantage, then they should provide for the kids that deserve the smart boards and iPads in the library, like the kids in New York City school system.
Whenever I think of New York City, I see it as the land of opportunity and challenges. It’s where the Statue of Liberty was placed, Ellis Island and many other historic land spots where people had nothing and became the most successful people in America. Unfortunately, for the students in the NYC school system, they aren’t so lucky as we are. The school budget isn’t fit for every little thing that teachers need to give their students the best education that they deserve. As a teacher in the NYC school system, I imagine it to be one of the most difficult teaching jobs in America. Either the student is a neglected child living in an unstable home or the student doesn’t have a family. It takes determination and courage to try to educate these kids. In the last four years, teachers have been asked to cut 13.7% of their budget. This is a major problem because each year, the class sizes have been increasing, which means more money is needed to fund everything that the student needs to learn and grow in an educational environment. 88 schools in the NYC school system requested more money. How many do you think were approved? If you guessed none, then you hit the nail on the head. How many schools are in the New Canaan school system? Five. How many, if requested more money, would be approved? All of them. Is it necessary for any of the five? No. If more towns like New Canaan would not spend money on unnecessary items such as iPads in the library for students to rent out, then that money could be more useful at schools like NYC schools. “I thought about getting rid of the entire foreign-language department,” which is made up of two Spanish teachers, said Dr. Blake, principal of the Science, Technology and Research Early College in Brooklyn “but how can you expect to prepare your students for college if there’s no foreign language in your school?”. If more schools like this one has to completely demolish a department in the school, then New Canaan kids can live without some of the wasteful smart boards in every single classroom at the high school.
All this talk about budget cuts connects to the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. What if the kids living in the city were the ones destined to find the cure to cancer or Alzheimer’s disease? What if one of the girls in the 7th grade were to become the first woman as President of the United States? Do you think they would have that opportunity without the appropriate technology in high school or college? How did Bill Gates do it? Well, he was born at the right time, went to the right schools, and became the richest man in the world. The students in New York City are the ones that care about their education and being someone better then who they are now or who their parents are. They want to make a difference in the world because of where and how they grew up. They don’t want to end up living in the projects like they do now. I don’t believe that they deserve three assistant principals, while at the same time are teaching four different classes a day. They deserve teachers that are dedicated 100% to the educational value of what they are teaching and who enjoy sharing their knowledge to the future of America. Being raised in New Canaan has taught me to appreciate my education and my school, because their are kids, just an hour train ride away, that would die for the life that I have.
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