Many of the gambits at the recent Exeter regional (SAU 16) deliberative meeting, and last year for the Brentwood elementary school, will certainly recur at a town meeting next month near you, and you should identify and resist them.
1. The Pledge of Allegiance and a youth choir singing the National Anthem are not indeed to ground the meeting in patriotism or nationhood but to soften voters up to think as a collective and to consider the young beneficiaries, as when a welfare mother steals food for the babies. (No, don’t object to saying the Pledge! Choose your shots; there are better targets to follow.)
2. The meeting begins with a presentation by the school board touting the undeniable success of its government monopoly. In Exeter, this included a litany of calls for applause for seniority, followed by a video of a series of satisfied pupils talking herd-speak. The assertions made during this propaganda cannot be debated. In Brentwood, objections and even questions were ruled out of order, as “no warrant article has been moved and seconded.” This is your first hint that Parliamentary Rules are not rules but part of the con.
3. Brentwood’s moderator would not allow the mandatory vote to permit out-of-towners to speak. (You see, this would stifle the board’s lawyer, whom we paid–with your money–to attend and argue against you.) In Exeter, a majority gave union bosses from outside the region the right to participate. No; an assertion that cannot be argued by a member of the town or voting region does not have some inherent right to be heard.
4. Warrant articles propagandize by asserting that an off-budget spending item will have “No amount to be raised by taxation.” This is the absurd notion that there can be spending without costs. All such articles would spend money that would otherwise be saved and eventually returned to taxpayers. Dittoes budget “savings” compared to a phony baseline. Compare the effect of a Yes vote only to the effect of a No vote.
5. The headline in the handout at Exeter was that the requested budget reflected a 1% decrease from the previous year. Inside, they admitted that the new school is finally paid for, and there will be $2 million less interest; comparing apples to apples, the budget is actually up almost 4%. Presenters explained which costs have increased but not why they didn’t cut back elsewhere; the reason is that they never cut back anywhere. But every recent budget has had millions of excess in them. In addition, school population continues to crash, as the legislature haltingly lets parents reclaim their state taxes in Education Freedom Accounts and do the right thing for their children without quite paying twice.
An amendment to send half the excess back to taxpayers was met with ridicule, tears, and accusations of partisanship. One opponent said this proposed cut was “arbitrary” (an argument against cutting anything); another charged that it was less well-thought-out than the committee’s budget (an argument against amending anything). (Brentwood’s budget was defended with claims that “We spent a lot of time on this.”). Debate included two union representatives railing against the use of consultants and others raising workplace grievances. Such debate, on an amendment to merely change a dollar amount, is out of order unless the moderator’s goal is to fatigue voters.
6. Citizens make modest attempts to argue dollar amounts. No one ever makes the moral case. The late Grokster Jim Johnson was the last to come close in his 2023 floor remarks referencing “genitalia,” and he was met with personal attacks.
This is SAU 16, the region that–
–Makes barely over half of its pupils proficient. Yes, this is better than the state average of majority non-proficiency. Brentwood voters are told that at least we aren’t Stratham, as our postmaster tells us the USPS compares favorably to most other nations’ monopolies.
–Benched an athlete for privately offering a Bible-based opinion on “gender”–and requires that pupils playing games of pretend be met with support and participation–that is, refuses to teach.
-Marked prom-goers’ hands with Sharpies if they refused to Biden up and wear a feedbag to the prom, to “control” a virus that notoriously did not affect young people.
–Has an “openly queer” Director of Remedial Racism (my term), hired straight from BLM, and given influence over pre-teen curriculum; and if he needs us to know he is queer, he certainly needs them to know.
–Is suing the State of New Hampshire to overturn the new law against teaching “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, but in the meantime has a website peppered with references to DEI.
And see Ann Marie Banfield’s articles on the verbal sexual games with pupils, occasionally becoming physical abuse. Is this supposed to be a surprise? Why would we expect there to be consequences?
7. The board’s lawyer is used as the final word against dissenters. Dissenters open the board up to litigation. (Conservatives willing to incur additional legal costs?–They must be hypocrites!)
A citizen petition proposed that we stop electing regional board members at large, in which voters in each town vote on who best represents every other town. This, like ranked-choice voting in Maine, mostly serves to win through confusion.
The district’s 3-2-1-1-1-1 apportionment of members to towns is obsolete, permissible only because all voters have the same ballot full of strangers–which is the problem, after all. The lawyer said that giving each town its own district would fail one-person-one-vote. But this is one legal opinion, not the word of God. The other side of the story is 2004, when the NH Supreme Court struck down the map of House districts and drew its own map, 88 mostly multi-town districts in which we voted for strangers. But the resulting legislature proposed and we ratified a constitutional amendment that defended floterial districts: We favored local representation over exact numerical equality.
Although the law bans Deliberative meetings from completely gutting a citizen proposal, SAU16 is the body that amended an article asserting “no confidence in the Superintendent” by deleting the word “no”! And here again, the citizen proposal was amended by voice vote to reverse its sense and reverse its binding effect. Voters in March will be asked to cast an “advisory” vote that the current arrangement is just fine. A Yes vote might be used against us next time; a No vote will simply be meaningless. The moderator claimed not to have the power to rule on whether the resulting wording twisted the proposers’ intent, merely saying it addressed the same subject matter. And no one argued that this verbal hack was “not as well-thought-out” as the original proposal had been.
A future proposal with a 7-3-2-1-1-1 reapportionment would surely be close enough to one-person-one-vote–but would be sabotaged in exactly the same way.
8. We are all told that direct democracy and public education are the linch-pins of civility. This is absurd, even to readers who have never gotten up to speak and heard schoolmarms hiss. Respect for others’ rights is the linch-pin. The form of government is irrelevant when the essence of government is taking other people’s money, using the implied threat of force, to support unionized, tenured personnel.
9. Regarding the legislature’s new law against DEI: You cannot legislate to make a racket run like a business, and government education is a racket, which would have too few customers to cover its overhead if the state really put voluntary alternatives on an equal footing. As they should: You cannot rear a principled generation with teachers whose salaries are raised at gunpoint.
