Word: westons
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...issue at hand: whether to raise local property taxes or cut Weston's $7 million school budget by $400,000 for the 1981-82 school year. With indirect federal subsidies suddenly imperiled, the town cannot decide whether to spend less in the future or tax itself more. "We must face economic realities," intones Budget Basher John Lupton, a silver-haired onetime advertising executive remotely related to Puritan Spoilsport Cotton Mather. But Lupton is having trouble convincing his neighbors that his newly formed antiwaste group, COST (Coalition Opposing Soaring Taxes) is not antieducation...
Education is Weston's main pride and principal industry-in fact, its only industry. Declares Westonite Businessman and Parent David Purvis: "We moved to Weston because it had a serious school system. I am willing to spend what it takes to keep it that way." IBM Executive Robert Williams calculates that raising taxes will cost a mere 550 per citizen per day. He wonders if "we should risk our educational system" for such a paltry...
...board of education member explains that the proposed spending cut would force the firing of 25% of the teaching staff, the scrapping of all electives, the ballooning of the town's enviable 14-to-l ratio of students to teachers-in short, the end to "quality education" in Weston...
Just as Pentagon analysts tend to judge military power by the rise of defense spending, Weston's parents have learned to equate quality education with regular yearly jumps in the school budget. There has never been much real pressure to hold spending in check, and budgets have ballooned accordingly. In 1980 per-pupil expenditure for operations and amortization exceeded $3,600 for the town's 1,922 schoolchildren, placing Weston in the ranks of educationally elite suburbs like Winnetka, Ill., whose New Trier East High School is widely looked upon as the best public secondary school...
...Much of Weston's school budget money has been spent putting together, and steadily enriching, a curriculum that many a small college would be proud to call its own. During the 1981-82 school year, Weston's 750 or so high school students will be able to pick and choose from among 31 different English courses, 20 courses in mathematics, 27 different foreign and ancient language offerings, and a delicatessen of diverting electives ranging - from interior design, film and the principles of collage and batik to something called "Advanced Foods...