Hope In The Land Of Oz

To the Editor:

The students, faculty, and volunteers of the Newtown Middle School are to be commended for putting on such a wonderful production of The Wizard of Oz this past weekend. The two performances at Reed Intermediate School were energetic and lots of fun. The students who participated both on and off stage did a tremendous job.

At the end of the second performance, the cast presented the faculty advisers with a gift: the students had purchased each a new auditorium seat at the middle school.

As we all know, the middle school auditorium is closed because the Board of Education and other elected officials have allowed it to fall into such disrepair that chairs began to break without warning when students would sit in them, posing a danger to the health of the students. The school has been asking the community to donate funds to buy new seats. The closure of the auditorium has prompted the Board of Education to address fixing this problem, and the board is looking into allocating $100,000 or so of its more than $60 million budget to fix the auditorium seating.

Despite a significant hurdle to overcome with the loss of the auditorium, our drama “professionals” at the middle school carried off their performance with great flair.

Let’s hope that the next time the middle school mounts a production, our Board of Education will have risen to the challenge and fixed the middle school auditorium so our students can get back their theater!

I hold out hope that this will occur based on something unrelated that occurred in town this week. Our town actually posted budget information on the town website for the first time. For the past 25 years, we have had one notebook on the town budget available in town hall, something that is of little use to those of us who must commute to work and are unable to get to town hall between the hours of 8 am and 4 pm to study the budget. Thanks to the Board of Finance and Ben Spragg for implementing the suggestion made at the recent public hearing to put budget information on the town website through the use of pdf files. Now, if only we could get the entire budget binder on the web next year. Hope springs eternal in the merry old land of Oz.

Gary Davis

We Care About Newtown (WeCAN)

23 Charter Ridge Drive, Sandy Hook                            March 7, 2007