The City of Claremont is in a tough spot. The district’s teaching staff has not been able to produce students educated to an acceptable level of proficiency for quite some time. The district’s administration has failed to operate the district like a legitimate business despite multiple leadership changes. Several generations of school boards have utterly failed to exercise their fiduciary responsibilities. Taxpayers stay away in droves from deliberative sessions and school board elections. The $5 million deficit, coming as it does on the heels of the recent property tax increases, makes it highly unlikely that the deficit will be closed by an infusion of local funding, leaving school closing and staff layoffs as the only way forward.
The state-level elected officials who spoke at the last school board meeting blamed it all on the State’s failure to comply with State Supreme Court decisions requiring the state to raise more tax money from rich people and spend it on Claremont, presumably to maintain our abysmal proficiency rates, championship sports teams, and school bands. This viewpoint is the closest thing to a cargo cult that I’ve encountered. As you may know, cargo cults emerged among the Melanesian inhabitants of New Guinea during the 1940s. Before the arrival of Evangelical missionaries, European colonists, and the Second World War, many of New Guinea’s inhabitants in the isolated mountainous interior regions were living in the Stone Age. Their syncretic combination of traditional religions and evangelical Christianity led some to interpret the introduction of cargo aircraft, such as the DC-3, as devices carrying gifts for them from their ancestors. This led some of them to construct faux runways, complete with landing lights and control towers constructed from palm trees, to attract these airplanes, which, in turn, led to some unfortunate aircraft accidents that served to reinforce their beliefs. In Claremont, we have a similar situation. Progressive Democrats have combined their traditional beliefs, including slavery, segregation, racism, and eugenics, with the evangelical belief that LBJ’s Great Society washed away any previous sins, making them the perfect arbiters of who the government should coerce and how the spoils of that coercion should be dispensed. They believe they know best how other people’s money should be spent.
So, where is the silver lining? It takes two forms. First of all, the school district has demonstrated to the community that, despite its high-sounding mission statement and goals, it cannot support parents in fulfilling their obligation to educate their children. Parents will simply have to look elsewhere. Fortunately, there are a plethora of resources available to them, and information about these resources can be found at edopt.org. This is cold comfort to the seniors who are having their academic careers hamstrung at the least opportune stage of their secondary school careers. I suspect that classes at River Valley Community College may be their best alternative. The second silver lining is the demonstration that the Fairness in Funding approach is quite literally bankrupt. If SAU6 had ten times as much money, nothing would change in terms of proficiency, but the deficit would be $50 million instead of $5 million.
What shouldn’t we do? The first thing we should not do is a forensic audit. As someone who has participated in forensic audits examining events with many more significant digits than $5 million, the time and effort required in this case is not worth it. While a search for the guilty seems appealing, it will only lead to praise and honors for the nonparticipants. And we must remember that while the deficit is significant, it’s not like someone is driving around in a Bugatti Veyron purchased with those funds.
The next thing we should not do is flood the governor’s office with requests for other people’s money. This entire situation is of our own creation. No one made us elect those who serve on the school board, vote for the budgets, or tolerate the lack of transparency in the budgeting process. Put simply, the downside of local control is local responsibility.
In closing, I suggest that the entire board resign before the next election. Fortunately, ours is not an honor-based society like Japan, so there’s no need for seppuku. Resigning would allow the taxpayers of Claremont to create a board that is heavy on business management experience and light on teaching experience.
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With apologies, this post was originally published with the wrong byline. That has been corrected.
