Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
We Could Ask for Santa Anna or King George III Back
Last week there was a merry meeting of the democratically-elected Houston I.S.D. school trustees with lots of adults yelling at each other “for the children” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/04/25/wild-night-at-houston-school-board-meeting-as-police-drag-out-protesters/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.8bd7fc283371).
The democratically-elected board president, someone wielding a hyphen between her two names, ordered the boardroom cleared so that the people’s business could be continued. Removing the people from the people’s meeting dealing with the people’s business seems contradictory, but when there is disruption this is legal and necessary.
One of the people was shown being cop-pulled along the floor on her aspiration, but since the floor had recently been waxed by the always unappreciated cleaners she suffered only indignity. After a while the two police officers stopped (they seemed to be tired from the exertion of heaving democracy along) and asked the lady if she would like to walk now, and she did, and they helped her up, and life went on.
The thoughtful observer asks himself if any of the unhappy people yelling at their democratically-elected trustees, including the trustee with the hyphen, bothered to vote for or against them in the previous school board election.
Y’r ‘umble scrivener recuses himself from commenting on the specifics of the people’s business being conducted, but will address the matter of government by guerilla theatre.
Americans seem to have developed a tendency to try to govern by yelling instead of by voting. Only about 50% of the electorate – those people who are registered to vote - participated in the last several presidential elections. Democrats, Republicans, and all those little inhaled-too-much-weird-stuff parties yell and scream and ALL-CAPS on the InterGossip, but they don’t vote. Perhaps they are too busy yelling at or along with the fat boys on a.m. radio to do so.
Local school board elections are more important than presidential elections, because democratically-elected school boards are the people’s democratically-elected trustees, charged by the people with establishing local school policy in all matters, from curriculum to choosing the brand of floor wax for the people to be pulled along upon, and funding the people’s schools by assessing, taxing, and spending millions of dollars of tax revenues. School boards also hire and fire everyone, from the superintendent to the nice folks (always underpaid and underappreciated) who wax the floors so that the people may be pulled along them with minimal let, hindrance, or friction.
And yet voting in a local school board election is a lonely experience.
There is much babble about the decay of the public school system in this nation, but a prior point is that something that does not exist cannot decay. There has never been a public school system from sea to shining sea; there is only a mess of sometimes conflicting federal laws, state laws, judicial rulings, and policies set by local, democratically-elected boards of trustees.
The local trustees we elect do the metaphorical heavy lifting. While the Texas legislature swoons at the cooings of that seductive foreign publisher who pushes the goofy textbooks and goofier standardized tests inflicted on Texas children, the people’s democratically-elected board of trustees must make our children’s education function in spite of conflicting laws and rulings and edicts.
We the people are those “government schools” sneered at by the gossips because we the people are the government. It says so in the federal constitution and in the state constitution. If a school is bad it is because we the people make it so by voting for inept trustees or by not voting at all.
Our ancestors rid themselves of kings because they felt that the people knew their own needs best. To fail to vote is to surrender that individual power our ancestors sacrificed to give to us.
There is dignity in the exercise of power through the vote; there is only embarrassment in waving a MePhone around while yelling like an ill-raised brat.
In Texas, a very few good men and women are freely choosing the governance of their schools by secret ballot through the 5th of May. There aren’t many people voting, only the best, and you can choose to be one of the best.
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