Once upon a time there was a mother. She loved her children and their school so she volunteered to help in the classroom. She was impressed by the devotion of the teachers and the hours volunteered by the other parents, so she joined committees to help the school. One day a well-meaning friend suggested she was so smart and caring for the kids that she could help even more people if she ran for the school board.
She thought that this would be wonderful, and that being on the school board would really allow her to do something positive to help the schools do a better job of teaching all of the children. When she began working for the board she learned more than she ever wanted to know about test scores, No Child Left Behind, teachers unions, declining enrollment and language barriers. She worked hard, spent a lot of hours at meetings, and did her best to represent the interests of everyone. While it was challenging work and she didn’t receive a lot of appreciation, she felt good because she was helping the students.
Then, due to the poor economy, gridlock at the state capital and a business climate that has pushed a lot of enterprises – and their tax dollars – to other states, there was less money to run the schools. So the school board met with lots of different groups, trying to figure out how to spend less money and yet still make the schools work better for all the students. It was a very tough thing to figure out, and they had meeting after meeting after meeting. Everyone who attended these meetings had ideas on where the cuts should come from. There were teachers and teachers unions, and parents of elementary, middle and high school students – all seemed to have different needs and desires. Not every parent agreed with every other parent, and not every teacher agreed with every other teacher, but they all wanted to make sure that any cuts in the budget didn’t affect them. There were also administrators and bean counters and taxpayers who insisted that since we have less money we need to spend less money.
Finally after listening to everybody the board made proposals for reducing costs and for realigning schools so they would run more efficiently. And every time a proposal was made, one group of people would scream that the proposal would hurt their kids or their jobs. The board would offer up new proposals, and some people said they were good proposals and we should do them, and others said that they didn’t like the proposal and it wasn’t just right for their kids.
The board listened and listened. They squirmed and stayed up at night worrying about it, and then they realized that there was no way to make everyone happy and that they just had to make a decision. So they did what they hoped was in the best interest of all of the children in the school district. Some people screamed that they didn’t like the decision, others cheered that it was a good decision, and still others were not sure what they thought about the proposal, but they knew it was time to move on and start focusing on teaching kids again.
But there was still one group who hadn’t gotten what they wanted. They got madder and madder, and decided that they wanted to fire this school board. They felt that if they could fire these school board members they could find some other people that they could put on the school board that would make things just the way they want them to be. Others were concerned that if some of the people from one school could fire the school board, it wouldn’t be fair to the people from all the other schools. Would the angry people put in somebody who would only care about the kids in their school and not everyone else?
Then the mother who volunteered to work so hard to help the students wondered what she had got herself into when she joined the school board. Why am I doing this, she asked herself? If I quit now, will whoever takes my place care about all the people, or only some kids and some teachers and some parents?
Watching all this was a wonderful parent who loved her children and their school, and she volunteered in their classroom to help all the children get a better education. One day her friend said that she should run for the school board. But the wonderful parent was sad and said, ‘No, I love our schools, but there is no way I have the strength to put myself and my family through the pain of what a school board member faces.’
~ Tim Hauserman attended Tahoe Lake School in one of its many previous configurations as a K-to-8 elementary school. He graduated from North Tahoe High School.
