By Diana NorwoodLos Alamos
First off, I’m very supportive of good education. However; I don’t feel that being taxed more, to support public schools is fair. Those of us who are entering our later years, are having to take care of our savings, for retirement, at which time we are on fixed incomes.
I have a theory, which I’m completely open to being corrected on. I feel like it would make so much better sense, to allow those of us who are 65 and older, to make voluntary donations to the schools.
Since the public schools are “non profit” entities; then there ought to be a way that we older folks would get a little bit of tax relief via a tax write off for said donations. Such a proposition would benefit the schools as well as the elderly in our community.
I would be more than happy to make a reasonable and “affordable to me” annual donation to the schools. I’m just a bit weary of having this money be “legislated” and thereby giving us no choice.
I was reminded of the quotation, “we should be free from taxation without representation”. Many of us are not represented by the public schools.
On a final note – I find it highly odd that the local high school, employs a “national fundraising and marketing firm” to collect money from us. I know this since I own a small business and the nice gentleman asking for money told me all about it when I questioned, “why the students aren’t doing the fundraising, themselves?”. That’s got to be quite expensive, and I don’t find myself inclined to support such things.
Please feel free to correct me, if my reasoning is unsound. Thank you.
