The other day, I posted a pamphlet that I handed out at my town’s annual school district meeting. If you haven’t seen it, you should probably read it before continuing, to provide context for what follows.
As indicated there, after the school board presented its explanation for the amount it was demanding, I made a motion to amend the amount from $1.7 million to $800 thousand and explained why that was a reasonable amount, based on the information in the pamphlet.
After some spirited debate, the amendment was accepted; and after some more debate, the amended article passed. So now, for the first time ever, our school board has a budget to work with, instead of a ransom to collect.
It turns out that once people see the difference between the two models of school funding, there is considerable support for moving from a ransom-based approach to a budget-based approach.
There will certainly be challenges for the school board to overcome — including recasting the new budget in terms that the Department of Revenue Administration will accept, and some possible legal challenges from residents who skipped the meeting — but we are fortunate to have a board that is choosing to embrace the challenges, rather than try to find ways to evade them.
Because the budget is low enough to make it impossible to just continue business as usual (trim a little here, add a little more there), the members of the board are empowered to actually search for the best way to educate the students in the district without fleecing the taxpayers. And they are excited about that.
This will also make school board meetings much more interesting for residents to attend, since they will be about looking for creative solutions — many of which may involve residents volunteering to help out with younger kids — rather than about trying (and usually failing) to contain the usual incremental bloat.
But however this turns out, I think it’s safe to say that no one in my town will ever again think: It doesn’t matter whether or not I go to the annual school district meeting.
