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Stella,

I understand what you're saying but we haave to look at some realities. Pilgrim currently houses about 1400 students. I don;t recall the exact dollars that SMMA recommended for Pilgrim & Vets. Ideally Vets would have closed for a year but to do that Aldrich & Gorton would have had to stay open. For them to stay open, we would have had to spend $2 million for the final phase of fire code work because the State Fire Marshal wouldn't grant any more delays on that on top if the 8 or 9 they had previously given us. So closing Vets was not really an option. I'm not comparing ourselves to others in the way you describe. MY point was that both those districts perform better than we do so it's not the buildings themselves that casue that achievement - it's what goes on inside the buildings that does. Too often we let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Bottom line is both SMMA & RIDE says that we need approximately $200 million to do everything. I'm saying that if we spent $200 million for all new schools, we'd be able to put, maybe, half our population in the new buildings. The oither half will be in our current buildings which still need capital inmprovements so where would those dollars come from? With respect to parity, that was a very significant issue during SMMA's hearings from parents and teachers. The very purpose of the bond is to bring, as best as possible, at least physical plant parity in terms of classrooms, technology capacity, etc. Your argument seems to acknowledge the lack of parity as something that's always going to be there. I'd disagree with that.