Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Transparency about the workings of an organization prevents corruption.
Speaking of corruption, inasmuch as the portion of your property tax bill going to the public schools is the single largest portion of that bill, did you ever wonder what they are doing with all your money?
While their mission is supposedly to educate our children and give them the tools to become productive, educated citizens, they actually spend your tax money on things that have little or nothing to do with that critical mission.
Like censorship.
Each school district/school board and each School Administrative Unit (an “SAU”) uses tax money to establish and maintain web sites. It is typically somewhat burdensome to find the actual email addresses of members of each school district on the various web sites, but with some digging, it can be done.
In other words, the individual email addresses of school district members, elected officials all, are publicly available and are usually provided, at taxpayer expense, through the servers of the relevant SAU’s.
Why would you want to get their email addresses?
Since they are all public, governmental officials, the citizenry has the absolute right under the US and NH Constitutions to contact them and petition for redress of their grievances. And, with the current state of our public schools, boy do the people have some grievances!
Or maybe you might want to ask a question? Or inform them of some educational or training opportunities.
But we seem to live in an age where censorship, whether by governmental entities like school districts and SAU’s, or by private companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, et al., has become the norm.
So now we turn to a most recent example of governmental censorship- censorship of anything that might challenge what the bureaucrats want their school district members to read or see. After all, the school district members are supposed to run the SAU’s of which they are a part- setting policies, hiring, and the like.
In recent days, attempts to send emails to the school district members in school districts that comprise SAU 16 (based in Exeter), SAU 24 (based in Henniker), and SAU 29 (based in Keene), using the publicly-available email addresses from the tax-supported web sites, by a non-profit that produces training seminars regarding our educational system and the governance issues surrounding our school districts, have been systematically “blocked” by the SAU’s involved.
One can reasonably assume that this blocking was done because the people in charge of the SAU’s do not like the messages of the non-profit and certainly do not want the school district members to be exposed to such dangerous, subversive emails or its educational opportunities.
But not to worry- it’s only your tax money and the education of your children at stake.
