All politics is local

Today is Election Day in these parts. For us, that pretty much means just the school board. And in contrast to the often boring races, this year’s campaign has featured some intrigue. Most of the seats are contested, and there are some pretty clear choices if you look just below the surface of the typical political platitudes.

One candidate distributed a flier throughout town (I wonder if he got the required permit?) that was remarkable for the amount of misleading information it contained. For example, it claimed his opponent had failed to attend every budget committee meeting. I happened to see his opponent at a Little League softball game a couple days after the flier went out, so I asked her about it. There has been exactly ONE of these meetings, and yes she did miss it—at the time the meeting notice went out, Comcast had some sort of Microsoft-related glitch causing some e-mails to not get delivered and she never got the meeting notice. But I guess the flier is sort of accurate in that regard; as she has missed every meeting—all one of them.

It also mentioned that spending is up (well, yes, after a down period, the state did come through with some additional funding that allowed some class sizes to be reduced), then juxtaposed that against a lower test scores statistic. Maybe you’ve heard that you can make numbers say anything you want, and that’s pretty much what’s happened here. The flier’s author took last year’s 10th grade test scores, which were among the lowest since testing began at the beginning of the century, and compared them to one year when a class had some of the highest scores recorded. Two data points, of course, do not make a trend, and there will always be differing levels of achievement from class to class, especially in smaller districts. He didn’t show the complete scores trend from year to year, though, nor from other classes, because revealing all the relevant information would have caused his argument to fall apart.

There was also some baseless whining about bond money going to salaries (which is closely regulated by law and by the terms of the bond measure) and a technology center which is claimed to be on the “back burner” (it’s actually a key centerpiece of how the bond money is going to be used).

Oh, and the rumors! That’s been the fun part. According to the rumor mill, my wife “verbally attacked” a neighbor regarding a school board race. Mind you, this neighbor came over to our place to approach my wife, not the other way around. And another neighbor happened to be about 15 feet away when this supposedly occurred; all he saw (and all that really happened) was a conversation. That’s just one of the silly examples.

A lot of this apparently started because a small group of citizens can’t be persuaded that it might be worth spending $10,000 to investigate ways to make sure the $40 million bond is utilized to have the greatest possible positive impact on our kids. But that’s another story.

Vote, vote, vote!