The people saying that our school board meetings have been hijacked by people with no children in the district are correct. I checked. Of the sixty-one names on the public-comment sheet in September, eleven had a child enrolled. The usual number of speakers before all this was three, sometimes two, occasionally zero. I said four years from memory; the sheets in the district office go back six and I have now read all of them, and the mean is 2.8.
So the factual claim is true. I want to argue that almost nothing follows from it, and that the people making it are drawing the wrong conclusion so consistently that I have started to think the conclusion came first.
The story on offer is that outside groups have manufactured a controversy and imported bodies to perform it. Parts of that are demonstrably right. There is money. There are scripts. I have watched two people read the same paragraph, differently punctuated, four speakers apart.
But consider the position from the other side, and consider it charitably, because I think the charitable version is the accurate one. If you are a person in this county with a strong view about how children should be educated, what is available to you? The state legislature meets ninety minutes away for four months and its education committee takes testimony by invitation. Congress is unreachable in any sense that matters. The county commission does not touch curriculum. There is exactly one body within driving distance that (a) makes decisions about children, (b) is legally required to let you speak, and (c) will look at you while you do it.
That is not hijacking. That is water finding the only opening in the pipe.
The nationalisation of local politics gets described as an infection — national issues contaminating a local body that used to handle buses and boilers. I think it is better described as a redirection, and the redirection is rational. Power moved upward for fifty years, out of the reach of a person with a Tuesday evening free. Participation did not move with it, because participation is a physical act that requires a room. So the accessible room fills up with the arguments that belong in the inaccessible ones.
Which means the complaint about outsiders, though factually correct, is an argument for something nobody making it wants: if the school board should only handle school matters, then the education arguments need somewhere else to go, and there is nowhere else, and building somewhere else is the actual proposal hiding underneath.
I do not want to soften what this costs. Our superintendent left in the week I was finishing this, and the letter she sent to staff is a more careful document than anything I have written about the subject. The two board members who were on the wrong side of a 2022 vote were followed to their cars. Four teachers I know have stopped assigning anything they would have to defend. The meetings now run past eleven and the buses and boilers are decided at 11:40 by five exhausted people. That is a genuine loss and it lands on children who have no part in any of it.
But when I hear a neighbour say these people should stay home, I notice that what I am hearing is a preference for the years when nobody came, and I remember those years. Three speakers. A newsletter nobody read. We called it a functioning board and what we meant was a quiet one.
I still take notes. There are sixty-one names now and I can no longer get through them before the meeting ends.
I did not skip it — it is in the piece, and it is why I said the cost lands on children who have no part in it. But you are right that I put it after the argument rather than before, and that is a choice worth defending or changing.
The car detail is in the essay. It is four paragraphs from the end. I only mention it because I nearly made the same complaint before I got there.