- After 36 years teaching in Holyoke public schools, Bernard Healy ’72, here with his grandson Henry, reflects on his time at UMass Amherst, where he also received a certificate of graduate study in 1980. He regards education funding by property taxes as fundamentally flawed.
Teaching for 36 years in Holyoke hasn’t dimmed Bernard Healy’s devotion to public education, but it has convinced him that schools are getting shortchanged. A veteran of cuts and school closings and shuffling teachers around to cover the gaps, Healy decided to hang up his hat and retire last spring.
“Do I miss it? Yeah. I miss the kids,” Healy ’72, ’80G said in an interview at his kitchen table one evening. He and his wife, Mary M. Healy ’83G, also a teacher in Holyoke, live in a small, working-class Cape house on a side street off of Route 5.
A native of the city and a Holyoke High graduate himself, Healy figured he was giving back to his community by returning to Holyoke to teach after going to UMass Amherst for college. Over the years, teaching in Holyoke has given him a front-row view into the inequities of the public education system. And the answer isn’t complicated, he says.
The problem is that schools are funded through the property tax, Healy says; “It is the fundamental problem in public education as I see it… And it has been true throughout my career, although it’s gotten worse today.”
Healy speaks softly, but insistently, like someone who has already had this conversation dozens of times before: Because of this funding structure, children who grow up in poor communities aren’t afforded the same education as children who grow up in rich communities, despite the efforts in the state to come up with a formula for state aid and efforts at the federal level such as the No Child Left Behind bill co-sponsored by Senator Edward Kennedy.
“I’m a great believer in public education and I’ll tell you why,” Healy said. “It is the only, only, only, only truly democratic institution in this country. You know what the beauty of it is? You take all these different kids, put them in the same room in September and by June you come up with something new. That was the exhilarating part of teaching.”
Healy said what is needed is a separate tax dedicated to schools, one that is progressive, ongoing, and statewide. “Why keep applying band-aids to a tumor? Until that question is resolved once and for all, No Child Left Behind isn’t going to work,” he said.
“This year, they closed three schools in Holyoke, because the funding wasn’t there. So they had to reshuffle the kids, the teachers, the principals,” Healy said. “How do you meet the [federal requirements] when you’re closing schools?”
Healy related a conversation he had with a young teacher
who’d been teaching just five years. “They keep shifting everything,”
the young teacher told Healy. “They have to,” Healy said, “because
they don’t know about the funding source, you know, and what the next
funding source is going to dictate.”
Healy, who spent his career teaching social studies to middle-schoolers
and then American government and history and European history to high-schoolers,
knows the history in the state: the initiatives in the 1960s, 1970s
and 1990s to close the education gap and the Proposition
2-1/2 bill in the
early 1980s that put a squeeze on school budgets across the state.
He thinks another statewide initiative is what’s needed.
“I hate to sound like a broken record,” he said. “How we fund public schools is the real, fundamental question. Everything else is pretty unlovely. We’re going to do this, we’re going to do that, we’re going to do the next thing. And they might, but how long is it going to last? Is it ongoing?”
