Rose City Ruminations

We are a little more than knee-deep in the budget formulation process in Norwich and the quickest way to get a feel for what's important is to see where spending and investment priorities are. 

If you've purchased a budget book in years past, you already know you'll have to do that by mail this year but why not go to the city's website, and download the City Manager's proposed budget along with the supporting slides and the schedule of hearings.

City departmental budget hearings are ongoing and the ones held so far are also on the website with the first public budget hearing tomorrow night at seven-thirty.

There's a lot of moving parts to public participation that could benefit from some technical tweaking, based on recent weeks' experiences, but this I know in times where desires outnumber dollars, we should agree the budget is our money and its creation should reflect our choices. We should never confuse what we need with what we want now. 

Opinions, my mom once told me, are a lot like noses; everybody has one and they all smell (my Dad’s version used a different body part), so here’s what I “nose” about the proposed budget and my opinion will not make me many, if any, friends.

I am most concerned that how we plan, deliver and pay for public education is in desperate need of reinvention. Not just here in Norwich, but throughout our state and, to the best of my experiences, across the country.

If there's one takeaway from the protective prophylaxis we've had for our schools and children, it should be that a lot more emphasis (and money) is needed for the tools, talents, and technologies we will need to deploy to support our teachers and children not just for next year but for the rest of this century.

What we're doing, in my less than expert opinion, is a fine Industrial Age answer that has grown more obsolete with every day since Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1990, ushering in the Knowledge Age. 

Quite frankly, we need to stop thinking about schools as strictly brick and mortar buildings, intending no disrespect to the recently created School Building Committee, whose members have an important role in shaping tomorrow. 

But also, a part of that tomorrow and beyond are the efforts being made today by our Norwich Public Schools leadership to overcome the digital divide so many in our community face when we try to use tools and technologies such as distance learning and virtual classrooms, because business as usual in this, the third decade of the 21st Century has less and less to do with places and spaces and more to do with opportunities and innovations. 

I don’t pretend to know where the money we’ll need to do all of this comes from (hint: it will have more to do with hard choices and less to do with GoFundMe pages) but not talking about its inevitability doesn’t diminish its necessity. 

Education is our best tool as a society to create solutions we don't yet even know we need, and if you think education is too expensive wait until we calculate the cost of ignorance. 

-bill kenny