I saw a couple of very disappointing stories on the front page of last week’s Times.

To summarize: our town has decided to cut funding for the Extended Hands Food Bank and the Boys and Girls Club, whilst maintaining funding for the tourism bureau, the local theater and a “business incubator.”

Meanwhile, our School District is so impoverished it can’t afford a graduation ceremony for its students.

The rationale: the Fountain Hills Theater, the Tourism Bureau and the “business incubator” are good for local businesses. The idea appears to be that the vague, unquantifiable effect that these entities have on our town economy is somehow of greater importance than educating and caring for our children and feeding the poor.

Does this seem wrong to anyone?

I am not against local businesses. I am not against community theater. However, I cannot accept abandoning the most vulnerable members of our community: our children and our poorer residents, just to make things a little nicer for the rest of us.

It would take an additional $6,000 to maintain the food bank’s funding at its current level. If we took that from the theater budget allocation, that would be a reduction for the theater of less than 10 percent.

If we took the $16,000 needed to make up the shortfall in the Boys and Girls Club’s funding from the Tourism Bureau, that would be a cut of roughly 15 percent. Less if we forgot about the “business incubator.”

As for our grossly underfunded schools: we could easily find more funding for them if we simply took the time to eliminate some of the bloated bureaucracy at our town offices.

Or we could let things stay how they are, and leave the less fortunate and our children out in the cold.