Time for a Carbon County school district

Dear Editor and "We the People" of Carbon County,

With Gov. Tom Wolf advocating possibly the elimination of property tax as a way of funding our public schools in Pennsylvania, probably a dollar amount per student will be distributed by our Pennsylvania Department of Education to school districts.

School directors of our Carbon County school districts cannot nor should not wait to respond to the new way to fund our public schools.

Former Gov. Ed Rendell wanted to merge the present 500 state school districts to around 200 school districts.

His belief as well as mine is that we have unnecessary duplication in the administration of our 500 school districts.

For example, in Carbon County we have five administration buildings, five superintendents, five directors of curriculum, five directors of special education, five directors of information and technology, five athletic directors, five business managers, five supervisors of building and grounds, five supervisors of security, five transportation coordinators, and many other management positions which could be merged if we had one Carbon County School District working out of one Carbon County Administration building.

Our elementary and high schools would remain the same, our principals and teachers are doing a wonderful job with the education of our youth, and possibly with the merging of the administrations we also could inject more funds into the classrooms via reduced class size, etc.

Presently our Carbon school districts have a combined annual budget in the $120 million range.

The time is now to merge the five school districts into one and start to remove duplication in the administration of our school districts.

Look for information about a public meeting of representatives of our five school districts to explore making this merger a reality.

Yours for bettereducation of our youth,

Gerald Strubinger,

School director, Jim Thorpe Area School District