by Joe Fitzgerald
They’re the exaggeratists. Maybe the Exaggerati. They take the smallest thing and blow it up to a crisis. Their eye is not on the sparrow, but on its feathers. And heaven help the sparrow whose feathers don’t decently cover her.
In the city this year the Exaggerati went door to door speaking of pornography in the school libraries. There was this one book, and it’s off the shelves. They claimed parental rights were being abridged because of what pronouns kids wanted to use. Couple of dozen kids, maybe, out of 6,000.
I worked hard for the School Board candidates who opposed the Exaggerati and beat them by 20 points. Partly because all politics is personal, and I care who my wife Deb serves with on School Board. And partly because I don’t want to live in the kind of city the Exaggerati would give us, and I don’t live in the city they imagine.
Still, I could have made a strong argument for voting for the Exaggerati out of concern for the city’s future. Think about what may happen in Rockingham County next year. At least two long-serving pragmatic members are leaving the county’s School Board. Lowell and Dan share decades of experience on the board and they’ve kept non-school issues out of their service. But the Exaggerati already hold one seat and will try for more. If they land a majority on the board, the county schools will take a turn for the worse, and parents who aren’t obsessed with wedge issues will have to look for somewhere to send their kids.
The argument for voting for the Exaggerati this year would have been to guarantee the city schools would move backward at the same pace as the county’s might. A shared sense of educational disaster would give the county’s parents nowhere to go, and save our schools from an onslaught of new students. I mean, we’re already building a new high school and will probably have to build a new elementary if the City Council approves the Bluestone Town Center next year. There must be limits to a city’s generosity.
But thanks to the efforts of people like me and the EAK ticket, the city will still shine on the hill. So we should take advantage of the benefits of the county’s potential backward move.
Think about it. Two more ill-tempered, cross board members cross the electoral bridge, so to speak, and wind up sitting across from someone who shares their views. Education professionals will roll their eyes and look for work elsewhere, and the best the county can get for a new superintendent is someone whose management experience is running a nail parlor in Southside Richmond and has educational experience teaching classes in buffing and polishing.
Let’s look at the bright side. Teachers in the county, hounded by board members about what’s on their bulletin boards or which bathroom kids use will become fed up, and many of them will be examining their options by the end of the ’23-’24 school year, just in time for the opening of Rocktown High School in ’24-’25. With a nationwide shortage of experienced teachers and a dearth of new ones, a new high school could be hard to staff. But it will be easier with several hundred educators in the surrounding county looking to escape micromanagement bordering on harassment.
This modest proposal ignores the needs of the county’s children, but that’s what modest proposals do. If changes in county school management drive parents to the city, it will happen gradually while they sell their county homes and find repurposed student apartments in the city. The teachers, who can live anywhere, can start immediately.
This solution, which begins with city progressives working for candidates in the county whose principles they despise, is a short-term fix. But in a world where the word “crisis” pops up like dandelions in a field, we can’t solve the police crisis, the teacher crisis, the housing crisis, and the common sense crisis quickly. Especially when the only ones who have to think ahead are teachers preparing lesson plans and high school seniors looking at colleges. Everyone else can keep kicking cans down the road until the clatter deafens us all.
What are the long-term implications of electorally trashing the county schools to marginally improve the city schools? We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Joe Fitzgerald is a former mayor of Harrisonburg. This column is republished with permission from his blog, Still Not Sleeping.
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