Letters to the Editor (Dec. 7)

Balanced scheduling won’t work in Belen 

Editor: 

Balanced scheduling and its social implications are an important topic to discuss like all issues that can affect a society. We must balance both sides to determine what is the value or disvalue, and as soon as we determine clear ideas on both sides, we must make a determination to drop the idea if there is a clear benefit from one option over the other. 

The balanced scheduling issue has been an issue of discussion for several decades, and several institutions have adopted it with mediocre success. The idea of balanced scheduling isn’t wrong in itself, but the underlying issue of change for the sake of change can be wrong, especially when premised on false or biased arguments that the change is to benefit the student. 

Year-round schooling has been circulating since I was in elementary, which has been at least 35 years. If there was a clear benefit to this option, it would have taken off right away, just like indoor plumbing, combustion engines, the internet, etc. We know balanced scheduling doesn’t produce a more intellectual or well-mannered student. All it can do, at best, is to occupy peak time that rightly belongs to the nuclear family. 

Balanced scheduling is not a new idea but is now being implemented, most likely from a few politicians who would like to make big changes to show the importance of themselves, for the credit of changing a culture. However, these changes would affect the nuclear family in a negative way by providing less focused family time that comes during longer summer breaks. The easiest way to implement more control over the family is through the governmental and political realm by tying up the student, with the help of more government funding and control, in an attempt to teach the children what the parents should or shouldn’t be teaching their children themselves.  

This is easily done through the public government system, where families don’t have much choice or may be unaware of what the implications that more required time away from the parents might bring to the student. This social experiment is easiest to perform on the poor and marginalized families that don’t have any choice in where they send their children to school.  

Most families have to depend on the public school system to make the right decisions to properly educate their children. Even the families that can afford to send their children to Saint Pius, GK Chesterton or Albuquerque Academy may not feel it is appropriate to have their children driving to another city just to have an education that our community should be providing. 

The preparation for college or higher education should be the motivation of our high school curriculum. Seniors in high school don’t sit in the same classroom all day with the same teacher as they do in kindergarten. Thus, we need to have similar scheduling at the high school level as we do in colleges in order to make the proper adjustments for our children’s success in college.  

It is understood that our students already have to be in the classroom for a certain amount of time, but we still, as the parents, should have the option to pick which hours of the day and year are the most convenient for our families. Most families do not want to give more peak hours of the year to our government education. 

The public school system doesn’t have the best record for positive social engineering. We’ve seen God taken out of the classrooms, students encouraged to identify as cats or other absurd un-objective natures, abortions without parental consent, etc. Luckily, Belen has done a decent job in preventing a lot of the crazy philosophies that are implemented in other public school settings, and a balanced schedule isn’t the solution for the rates of our low academic scoring in Belen. 

St. Mary’s school is thriving academically. They rank among the best in the nation. St. Mary’s has the same exact students that go to Belen Consolidated Schools. It is not hard to see that the key difference is that one school encourages the option to speak freely of our God and creator.  

One can argue that the students of St. Mary’s come from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, but that is not true in all cases. A lot of the families depend on scholarships or the financial aid that St. Mary’s offers.  

Some key differences are that the families from St. Mary’s in Belen have a strong focus on the well-being of their child, and the freedom to bring Christ into their speech in the school setting. In an intelligent thought provoking context, without the fear of being persecuted from scoffers and people that might fear the Gospel message, a person should be entitled to free speech and thinking.  

If we can change those two key differences at the public school level, Belen Schools would thrive along with our community and therefore considering a balanced schedule would be unnecessary. 

Dr. Teles J. Sanchez 

Belen