Woodstock CT Café

Per pupil regular education costs (minus construction costs, minus SPED, minus transportation) for 2007-08:
K-8 … $7793 per pupil
Academy …$9998 per pupil
see below

At last night’s Board of Education meeting the proposed 2008/2009 budget was revealed a page at a time.

The meeting started off with a presentation from the Academy. They had brought a battery of flat screen monitors (four for the BOE and two facing the audience) for the annual power point presentation. An opening photomontage failed to boot, so the budget presentation began. Paper copies of the budget presentation were distributed to the board members, but the generous stack of extras was not offered to the audience. After a loudly whispered request from an audience member, copies of the presentation were passed out or retrieved by individuals.

The presentation was the regular collection of graphs and pie charts with little if any budget information. The information that actually made its way into the color, six-page, doubled-sided, coated photo paper collection floated atop the pages with very little context making evaluation nearly impossible. The long and short of it is that the tuition for the Academy is increasing from $10,277 to $10,715 per pupil (includes construction costs) – and increase of $438 (4.26%) or a $202,356 hit to our education budget. Frankly, the whole process was reminiscent of getting the check at a restaurant; it’s very difficult to figure out if the price of the meal is reflective of the reasonable cost of the ingredients and labor… or… Read the rest of this entry »

from John & Becki

Today is our special day, the day we got hitched.

On Sunday February 28th, 1988, Becki and I drove up to the Hyatt at North Lake Tahoe and spent the night at the slots ’till about 2 AM. The next day, Leap Day, we drove over to Carson City NV. We found the local court house and a  parking place with a meter that still had 40 minutes on it. There was no line at the wedding license desk so we stepped right up, paid 15 bucks, and headed back to our car with license in hand. Seeing that we still had  about 25 minutes left on the meter, we decided to take a stroll a block or two down to the wedding chapel shown below. We knocked on the door and were met with a waft of chicken soup as the door opened up. The owner of the chapel was standing at the door along with her toddler son with broken leg in a cast, and he also seemed a little agitated by the situation. She ushered us in saying that she would call the minister who lived a few minutes away. During that few minutes she insisted in showing us the three optional rooms that were available for our marriage. All the while, as we toured the establishment, we insisted that we weren’t interested in an elaborate wedding - we wanted the $20 version plus $5 for the witness. So this was settled as the minister arrived. I hardly remember the ceremony, but after all, our life together had been splendid already. We thanked all for attending our wedding and headed back to our car. The meter was barely out of time. So we headed back to Tahoe and then on to Palo Alto to finish an otherwise typical spring day (where spring arrives in January and February).

(1) Us nine months earlier on the Golden Gate on its 50th anniversery (2) our house on Maureen in Palo Alto CA (3) Becki eight months earlier on the Statue of Lib, (4) me and Mariah in DC in 1991, and (5) Becki and Mariah at Academy graduation in 2006.