(HOST) It’s tax time, and commentator Deborah Luskin has been thinking about how we invest our tax dollars – and the old saying “Penny wise, pound foolish”.
(LUSKIN) I teach in the Springfield Prison, Vermont’s newest. It’s gleaming, spacious and well maintained. Just five years old, this prison employs 150 people; 352 of its 378 beds are filled.
My local high school is almost forty years old, employs seventy-one on staff and enrolls about four hundred kids. Reaccredited in 2005, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges reported “significant space issues,” They said, quote, “The towns need to develop and fund a capital improvement plan that will provide major renovations to all of the facilities and/or build new ones.” End quote. Nevertheless, since then, residents from the district have voted down bonds for improvements and repairs – twice.
High school is the last publicly funded stepping-stone into adulthood our society provides before teens either go to college, go to work – or go to jail. And an alarming number of Vermont’s youth are in jail; forty-seven percent of our prison population is under twenty-five years old.
The cost of keeping an inmate at Springfield for a year is slightly more than the salary paid to the librarian at our school. Yet whenever school repairs, expansion or improvements make it to a ballot, signs instructing passersby to “Vote No” bloom on front lawns, and letters appear in the paper, denouncing the cost of education generally, and the so-called “frills” of drama, music and art. Only those who object to new jails in their own backyards protest expensive, new prisons; the rest of us mutely pay our share of the costs.
Because a high school education is essential to employment and socialization, Vermont requires all inmates under twenty-two, and without a diploma, to attend The Community High School of Vermont. Taxpayers don’t protest this expense, because it doesn’t come before a local vote. We allow our state lawmakers to spend money with more freedom than we spend it ourselves.
The Community High School is a good one, and I applaud the state’s efforts to educate those in jail. But my local high school is also a good one. Every school report boasts our kids’ success in music, sports, writing and art as well as acceptances at competitive colleges. The majority of our high school graduates go on to become productive members of society, eventually becoming tax payers themselves.
I don’t love paying taxes; I don’t know anyone who does. But I prefer paying my local taxes than those I mail in to the state or the feds. My local taxes support lean budgets put together by volunteer boards to support schools in our own communities. It’s hard to imagine a better investment. Besides, schools are cheaper than prisons. By investing in school buildings now, we have a chance of reducing the need and high cost of building yet more prisons in the future.
Deborah Luskin teaches writing and literature to non-traditional students in hospitals, libraries and prisons throughout Vermont.