Well, according to the last flier, the Manhasset School Board and the Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Lawrence Bozzomo, are now trying to prepare us for the giant step. The poorly thought out placing of sixth-grade students in the middle school and the impending bond issue that will surely come up for a vote in the amount of between $40 and $60 million. I note that they did not mention the cost of their program.

First, I am not against change and improvement, but it must be for the better and not just to make a change. My grandparents had outhouses, but I have two and a half bathrooms - that is change for the better.

I have in my possession a form written in beautiful quill pen script by my great-, a few more times, grandfather and it says: November 6th, 1826. We the Subscribers Do promise to pay to Henry Geil One Dollar and Seventy five cents for teaching Reading, Writing and Arithmetic for the term of Three Months and for Every Scholar Subscribed." It then listed 15 names. We went from that to the one-room schoolhouse as an improvement. The one-room schoolhouse was required in rural America and continued in some places until after WW II.

We now have the much larger regional schools and teach many more subjects. That was an improvement. However, the private teacher and the one-room schoolhouse turned out some great men, and women. With the urbanization came the crowded classroom of 50 and even more students per class. Still some students excelled to greatness, even under those conditions. Then the so-called professional educators got control and class sizes plummeted to even less than 20 students per class as teachers' salaries skyrocketed.

District-wide enrollment is now claimed to be 2,750 and rising to an expected 3,000 by 2008. According to a letter from Brenda S. Damiani, there were 2,848 students in 1969, 2,867 in 1970 and 2,846 in 1971. Enrollment then started down until 1987 when we had only 2,095. However, the interesting thing is that after 1969 there have been two bond issues to build additional classrooms. We seem to have educated the students in1969 and we have built a lot of new classrooms since then; where have they all gone?

There is no doubt that some improvement in the infrastructure is needed, but beyond that nothing is needed. Just a proper allocation of space and teachers.

It seems as though every few years the school board hires a new superintendent and he or she comes here with grandiose ideas of how the schools should be run. They should come here with the clear understanding that no major change is going to take place. Make do with what is available. Maintenance and upgrading of facilities would be a change for the better, but adding space that is not needed is not an improvement.

Other nearby schools educate their students for far less per student that we do and they send just as high a percentage of them to college as we do. Are their students more intelligent than ours, or are their teachers better teachers than ours, or both?

The school board and the superintendent of schools have got to realize that they have reached the limit on spending. Stop wasting money. Learn from Herricks School District and Chaminade how to run an efficient school district.

Eugene W. Garges