Why I’m voting against the override: We all want happiness and prosperity for our children. Nature and nurture so motivates us. Many of us extend this wish to our friends and neighbors, not all of whom live in Wayland. What prompts us to extend this goodwill of happiness and prosperity exclusively to Wayland only? What part of nature or nurture compels this?

Truth be told, outside of my family and the children of my friends and close neighbors, the bulk of my altruistic feelings and goodwill is global and not local. I am a citizen of America before I took up residence in Massachusetts, much less the town of Wayland. Our public educational system in America is in many placess a shambles. While there are many reasons for this, chief among them is the discriminatory way we fund public education in this county – almost wholly via property taxes. Our very survival as a true democracy is here at stake and yet the only sacrifice we’re called on to make is to happily pay an ever-increased tax burden to Wayland year after year so that many of our affluent neighbors can guarantee the economic prosperity they currently enjoy for their progeny. Meanwhile the vast American majority is undereducated, miseducated or worse.

So no, I’m not in favor of providing the highest quality of education for a favored few based upon a discriminatory system that all but guarantees failure for the majority.

In Wayland, too much emphasis is placed upon preparing for the right college so that one can obtain the right employment, so that one may enjoy the fruits of an economically affluent life. Public school education should not be limited to vocational preparation but must also include preparing the young to be active and effective citizens in a democracy.

Adults and teachers have a responsibility to provide them with a roadmap for a successful journey, not just a destination. Our children need to understand and learn from our failures as well as our successes. They need an arsenal of moral arrows to not only protect them from an increasingly distressing world but to help change that world for the better. They need shields to protect them from our mind and heart numbing popular culture, with its damaging sexism and racism. They need powerful cognitive skills to analyze advertising, television and the press, peer group pressure, and, yes, our political leaders.

Our children learn often by analogy, by the examples we set. The burdens that increased revenue for the schools places disproportionately on the old, retired and, yes, poor in town should be palpable and understood by all. When we raise the property tax we are celebrating our commitment to our youth and disregarding the needs of the aged.

Currently Wayland is a two-tier town – those that can just afford to live here and those whose appetite for more will eventually drive out the former. This too is a lesson our children will learn and someday emulate.

Gene Cosloy
Jeffrey Road

Why I am voting ‘no’ on the override: For quite some time I have been squarely on the fence, unsure whether to vote for or against the override. On principle, I am opposed to what has become a routine raising of taxes beyond what the Legislature has prescribed as an acceptable level of increase. Yet, I am troubled by the prospect of broadly cutting town services if we are limited to the 2.5 percent increase available without an override.

What has persuaded me to oppose the override this year is the realization that the voters will once again not be offered an opportunity to choose among specific groups of services they deem sufficiently meritorious to justify additional tax increases.

In my view, it does a disservice to the voters to offer us only an “all-or-nothing” choice. Wayland voters ought to have the opportunity to decide which types of services should be retained at current levels and which can be sacrificed in order to limit the amount of our annual tax increases. It is unreasonable to deprive voters of the opportunity to pass judgment on our various municipal services based on our individual perspectives of the value of those services. Voters should not have to approve all services in order to preserve the ones that are of value to them.

No one in town government is better qualified to speak for the importance of services to individual households than the homeowners themselves. By its refusal to permit voters to consider and pass judgment separately on different bundles of services, the administration arrogates to itself these value judgments.

This “all-or-nothing” approach is reminiscent of the funding proposal put forward – and rejected – a number of years ago for building a new high school. Rather than seeking to determine the level of expenditures the voters would tolerate – and prioritizing the features that could be acquired at that level – the groups promoting the construction of a new school decided what their requirements were and told the voters what the cost would be. That approach betrayed an arrogance that the voters found unacceptable. So should we now reject the “up or down” approach reflected by the override proposal on the ballot?

It has been argued that allowing “up or down” votes on individual bundles of services would be divisive, in that it would pit groups with differing needs and perspectives against each other. Of course it would. What of it? Any override vote is divisive, whether on individual services or on the entire package. We will only increase divisiveness and bitterness by forcing the populace to make a binary choice of either accepting or rejecting the entirety of the override package.

As long as we have only that binary choice, I will vote no.

Phillip L. Radoff
Fox Meadow Lane