To the Editor:

The BoE’s (Board of Education) claim that the high school is overcrowded while continuing to admit 280 students who do not live in Princeton is outrageous. The School Board would have us believe that these students — 1 in 6! — are somehow invisible, that the high school would be overcrowded whether they were there or not, and that it’s not really costing us anything to educate them, so the tuition they pay us is free money. This is nonsense. The BoE loses more than $2,500 on every one of them, and this figure does not include the money they now want for new construction so that they can keep on doing so. 

The bond issue would be for $130 million. Each of the owners of the approximately 7500 taxable properties in Town would be borrowing approximately $17,000 on average. This is real money, real debt. We’ll have 30 years to pay it back, plus interest.

There is no reason to expand Princeton High School at the present time. The Board’s insistence otherwise only undermines its claims about overcrowding elsewhere in the system. If the Board wants us to take those claims seriously, they should first stop admitting students who do not live here. 

Ken Fields

Linden Lane