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The Issue Should Not Be Confused With Irrelevant Ones

The Issue Should Not Be Confused With Irrelevant Ones image
Parent Issue
Day
9
Month
October
Year
1903
Copyright
Public Domain
OCR Text

On another page of this issue appears a communication from an esteemed correspondent on the "Tuition" issue, which the Argus desires to commend to the careful reading of Ann Arbor citizens, The Argus at the same time desires to call the attention of its readers to a wholly needless confusion of the question of non-resident tuition with the question of charging tuition of resident students which the Argus correspondent falls into, a confusion so manifest that it seems to be the result of design. Now, it should be understood once for all that no one is attacking the tuition charge to foreign or non-resident students in our high school, or the lower grades either. And it should be clearly understood, also, that by far the greater amount of the $6,000 tuition collected comes from non-resident students No one, so far as the Argus has heard, proposes to do away with this charge and admit students from all over the country to the school privileges paid for by Ann Arbor citizens free of charge. The agitation at the present time is simply for the abolition of the tuition charge demanded of bona fide residents who desire to take certain studies in the high school.

So far from desiring to have the tuition charge to non-resident students done away with, there is no objection to its being raised to this class of students, if it be not already as high as the cost of education to residents. If the special tuition for the study of languages be done away with, an equal or even larger amount should be added t othe general tuition charge required of non-residents pupils.

It should be borne in mind by all who desire to be clear on the issue under discussion that all of the $6,000 of tuition collected except something like $1,600, or at the outside $2,000, comes from non-resident students and would continue to be collected from the same source, if the tuition now required of resident students for the study of languages should be abolished. In other words the additional tax upon the whole school district would be some $1,600 instead of $6,000 as the Argus correspondent puts it. This amount added to the general school tax of the district would not be appreciable. Nor would there be any necessity of letting down the standard of our schools on this account. But it would  make our public schools free to resident pupils in all subjects taught in our courses of study as they should be, and as it is the intention of the state laws they should be.

No one, either, should be misled by the statement that people come here from Flint, Indiana, Montana and possibly Minnesota and obtain the advantages of our schools free. There may be isolated cases of this kind where the parents become residents of our city, legal residents. It is not clear, however, how a family from Indiana with the father continuing to reside there, could gain a residence here, The father's residence should determine the legal residence of the children. But undoubtedly there are evasions of the law relating to the payment of tuition as there are evasions of all other laws, but this makes no difference with the principle that Ann Arbor schools be free to resident pupils. Every citizen is entitled to send his children to some public school free from tuition charges.