Do we have a crisis on our hands? An article in the Enterprise reports on recent meetings of various county Boards of Education, all seeking ways to deal with a looming financial crisis in school budgets.

Deficits of $700,000 in Glen Lake and $500,000 in Suttons Bay are only the most spectacular examples of the financial woes that afflict all the peninsula's school districts in greater or lesser measure. At the heart of the problem are declining enrollments. And the solutions? There are no easy ones. Consolidation of personnel, programs, and facilities (like the shared supervisor experiment of Glen Lake and Suttons Bay) seem the only hope of avoiding deep and painful cuts in teacher staffing. It's a bad situation--the education of our children is an area where Leelanau needs to invest more, not less.