Do you agree with the School Committee’s decision to increase student fees to offset budget cuts at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School?

Neither choice accurately captures either a rationale for supporting a fee increase nor an argument against it. Parking fees are effectively a luxury tax - there is no defensible argument that driving to LS is an absolute necessity and that parking fees are going to tip the scales when gas is at $4 a gallon and rising. For instances where affordability presents an absolute and honest issue, LS has always offered financial assistance for those in true need. Activity and athletic fees, as Dr. Ritchie explained it, were redirected, budgetarily, back to the activities they were collected in the name of for next year. This year and previously activity fees went into the general budget pool and could be spent far afield from the activity the student paying the field particpated in, but now they will be expressly reserved to fund the activity they were collected in the name of, and only overages would be available for redirection to other areas. So an increase in fees means even more money going back directly to the activities themselves. This could be construed as a plus. The No option seems to suggest the notion that activities comprise some standard level of service of public schools, which I don't believe is the prevailing complaint about fee increases, nor the prevailing perception. Activity fees are the norm. What is questioned is the evidence that activity fees are fairly assessed to reflect true outlays in support of activities and not established arbitrarily at nice round numbers that actually result in cash windfalls to offset expenses that have nothing to do with the true cost of offering the activities or athletics.