Days of reckoning hit our schools

It is estimated that over half of the pregnancies in the United States are unplanned.

Those who are too young to remember the '60s and '70s missed a time not only of political strife and anti-war demonstrations and hippie lifestyles, but also a time of great concern for and education of our citizens about overpopulation, resource depletion and environmental degradation coupled with the sobering revelation of how these three very negative developments would affect our standard of living.

Some schools even instituted courses which taught students about future ramifications of ignoring these dynamics.

We are now, after decades of bingeing on self indulgence, beginning to face the harsh reality of the limits of our planet to support such careless self indulgences.

One example is the effect of our overpopulating our schools. Whether the new students are immigrants (legal or not) or the offspring of third or fourth generation Americans doesn't matter.

The fact is we have a free education system in the U.S. and an education for every student in our Schaumburg area costs about $112,000 for grade school and $92,000 for high school.

Our school system continues to pile up huge state debt for generous teacher retirement packages and give generous teacher salary plus benefit packages and build or update buildings.

Now with taxpayers stretched to the limit and state revenues falling, this system is collapsing.

Do we tax older folks right out of the homes they worked a lifetime to own or do we start cutting school funding with a very sharp knife?

School systems say "our high quality will suffer." Well maybe those teachers can find employment in New Trier area schools because our middle class here can't even come close to affording them and neither can our state income.

So unless we can get the corporate world to pay up a big chunk of the taxes they've avoided, along with the top 4 percent of our richest folks, the free ride is over.

Jim Peterson

Hoffman Estates