Every year the school tax goes up, property values go down and school performance remains poor. This growing crisis is hurting everyone. The Westbury School is one of the worst performing schools on Long Island for one simple reason; community pride in the school has been replaced by apathy. Sure there are other reasons, but the apathy is the pink elephant in the room. Community apathy is the overwhelming problem that no one wants to talk about. At board meetings and candidate forums no one shows up… and community interest in school events is no better. I’ve been mentoring the grade school students for 15 years and they are invariably bright. The only reason they don’t perform is that they don’t want to… and why should they when they see that the adults in their families and community don’t care either.
I’m tired of the bogus arguments that it’s the teachers’ fault or the administration’s fault. This is not a school system failure nearly as much it is a community failure. The vast majority of responsibility is ours—we the community. We collectively have abandoned the school and disgraced ourselves. It’s the school’s job to teach but it’s our responsibility to care about our children and prepare them to learn. Why should students, teachers, or administrators care if we don’t?
Replacing apathy with pride is job one because only pride can solve the remaining problems. We must accept that compulsory education has backfired and failed because government can enforce attendance but not performance. We must fight to release teenage students who are not ready to learn into a community volunteer based mentoring program until they are ready. We must fight to build this mentoring program. We must fight for a strong curriculum which focuses on pride, patriotism, student government, and altruism. Lastly we must fight against spending hundreds of millions of dollars for new school buildings until we show pride first. It’s simply unethical to expect outsiders to pour their resources into a community where two people show up to school board meetings. The buildings are in disrepair and over-crowed but until the students and community get decent grades we’re obligated by morality to patch the buildings and expand the hours.
The hard truth is that the Westbury school system is simply not a priority for the vast majority of the Westbury community and nothing can replace that. Honor and pride are virtues that can only come from the heart and soul of the people. Haven’t we heard this before? We advocate for a strong awareness campaign, initiated through the school board & administration, to illuminate the growing price of community apathy. Until then this problem will continue to grow.
—Gary Spinello
