If you were to buy a nice new automobile for $60,000, you would be very proud of yourself and your conspicuous status in the community. But, if you then learned your neighbor had bought the same new make and model for $45,000, your pride would be deflated. If your neighbors found out you paid $15,000 too much, they would laugh at you.

Well, we have lost our pride. The neighbors are laughing at us. The vaunted Manhasset School District is paying much too much for a product - excellent education for each child - that can be obtained elsewhere at less cost.

We are all agreed that we want excellent education for all the Manhasset children - not just those who have vocal parents or elitist ideas. Many of us also want firm and exercised fiscal responsibility in providing it. Let's all be proud of the way we provide this opportunity. We should not be the laughing-stock that we presently are by continuing blindly to throw money at something needlessly. Our product is our well-educated children. One lesson we are not teaching them is the value of money. Let us be proud of the way we provide for them. Good service for good money.

The community is split, and rightly so, between the dissenters and the ones who want to continue the status quo. Dissension is not divisiveness. Now we have individuals looking for data. Having different persuasions does not equal divisiveness. The debate should be on the facts. These should be readily available. If one set of facts are refuted only by calling them "lies and misinformation," then debate is turned into baseless attacks reflecting on the integrity of the attackers.

Up until last year, the school district operated as an essentially closed society not given to releasing any information except to members of its own committees. Even today, some think that one should be a member of a school committee or be present at board meetings in order to receive public information about the schools.

Costs have not been cut back appreciably this year. The principle portion of the budget is the cost of salaries and benefits. The public is concerned that the teachers union is demonstrating publicly for more benefits and extra pay, while the board is properly remaining silent. For at least six years a complaisant board awarded them compensation levels that are turning out to be onerous for the taxpayers. Significant givebacks in negotiating both the teachers' and the bus drivers' union contracts are in order. There is significant overstaffing and under productivity as compared with the staff-student radios in other school districts.

The major portion of the budget should be the target for major reductions. This portion is teachers and staff positions and salaries and benefits. The teachers' union has killed the golden goose by its greed.

For example, a new contract should not provide additional pay for any work that is normally done within the usual eight-hour days, such as grading exams or monitoring hallways, study halls, detention halls and lunchrooms or coaching physical education. A new contract should base retirement pay solely on high-three or last-three-years salary without any overtime or extra schedule compensation. A new contract should not pay for either teacher's time or tuition for continuing education when the incentive for increased pay is also based on completing that same education. A new contract should award increased pay for either time in grade or for increased education to a limit, but not both. We do not need PhDs in general education to teach many high school courses. We need good teachers with excellent command of their particular subject matter.

Tenure breeds apathy. It is time for the teachers to shake off their apathy and give back to the community many of the excesses sleepy boards have awarded them.

We now need a board that is forthright in its efforts to control costs. This one, with three incumbents from old times, has not shown any significant success with the present budget. While they have brought in new staff, they have not made visible progress to control this or the next budget.

Are you truly proud of spending more for the same product? If our children are truly better off because they get a superior education, show us the state statistics that prove this. "Richness" is an inadequate adjective unless it is properly quantified.

Paul Early