Each member of the Guilford County Board of Education makes $12,000 a year, a little bit more if he or she is chairman or vice chairman.
You couldn't offer me four times as much to do this job. Uh-uh. No way. Not ever.
One unsolved mystery of the universe is why anyone would.
Why anyone would go through the trouble of actually campaigning for the opportunity to be abused, ridiculed, second-guessed and personally attacked nearly 24 hours a day, seven days a week?
Consider the lovely representations, in effigy, of school board members Susan Mendenhall and Walter Childs near Southwest High School in north High Point.
Or similar effigies, just in time for last Halloween, of Mendenhall and Dot Kearns as demons attached to utility poles.
Even the county commissioners — where the attacks generally come from one another — have it easy by school board standards.
As for City Council seats? They're positively cushy by comparison.
The challenge faced by school board members is that we dump all of our problems in their laps and demand merely that they find a solution that will make everybody happy — all the time.
We screw things up and expect our schools to fix them.
Poverty. Drugs. Gangs. Illegal immigration. Segregated neighborhoods. Broken families. Homelessness. Suburban sprawl.
All of these issues find their ways into the classrooms and hallways of our public schools.
Add layers of federal and state bureaucracy, testing out of the wazoo (arguably too much), and an increasingly Balkanized community where What's In It for Me runs rampant over any lasting notion of the greater good, and you've got Guilford County.
Consider the violence last week at High Point Central and Smith high schools.
At Central, Principal Revonda Johnson was injured and hospitalized while attempting to break up a fight for the second time in two years.
Last year she was knocked unconscious.
Yet the school bears the brunt of the criticism and the stigma for the incident, not the community that sent the troubled teens to the school in the first place. Not the gang culture in some neighborhoods that helps feed the violence. Not the parents, who should be more culpable and accountable for their children's misbehavior than any administrator or faculty member.
Same difference at Smith, where on the same day one 16-year-old student attacked a police officer and another student was arrested for bringing a razor blade in a knife casing to school.
Small wonder, then, that so few challengers have stepped forward this year to run for school board seats.
You win, you lose. Whichever way you turn, you'll pay. Do the wrong thing and you're vilified. Do the right thing and you're vilified.
I don't always agree with this board, but my respect for the work it does — and the relentless grief it must endure — is unqualified.
As for all those parents who claim the board is the spawn of the devil (remember those Halloween effigies), it's a lot easier to criticize than be part of the solution, huh?
Not that the school board should be absolved of its own accountability.
This board seems strangely timid at times — more prone to listen to who shouts loudest than to the voices of reason.
This, despite having weathered fierce attempts to unseat incumbents in some corners of the community.
For instance, even after being targeted by disgruntled north High Point parents for their support of the controversial student reassignment for Andrews, Central and Southwest high schools, incumbents Kearns and Kris Cooke both won re-election in 2004.
Aside from District 2, no other school board races are contested in this year's election.
That may signal at least some satisfaction with the status quo. But it also probably signals a growing reluctance among potential candidates to wade into the shark pit of public school politics.
Meanwhile, against this backdrop of all this sturm and drang and endlessly flowing venom, it's worth wondering: Since a school board member is likely to at least figuratively be drawn and quartered no matter what he or she does, why not simply do the right thing?
And let the inevitable brickbats fall where they may.
Contact Editorial Page Editor Allen H. Johnson at ajohnson@news-record.com
Comments (15)
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Allen, you are absolutely right about being on the schooolboard being a thankless job. Because it is, here is a little guide to help prospective boardmembers avoid effigy.
#1 Don't have fake public hearings. Don't say you are holding hearings to get public input then do exact opposite of what the overwhelming majority of the public expresses at the meetings. If your mind is made up, simply say you are holding the meeting becuase you have to by law, but you don't want anybody to come. People will respect this.
#2 Don't turn down a chance to meet with a group of your constituents by saying you have "nothing more to say". People may think you no longer represent them.
#3 Don't say you are re-districting a school that is 40% minority but contains children coveted by your alma mater and that of your co-conspirators, by saying it is not diverse enough, while doing nothing about schools which are much less diverse.
#4 Don't remove children from schools by lottery with the penalty being random banishment to the second-worst performing highschool in the state. Come on, is this really that difficult to get.
#5 Don't take active measures to divide your community, playing one region or school of your district off against another. Probably not good, guys
#6 Don't spend weeks and weeks designing, refining and getting public feedback on re-districting maps and then unveil a never-seen- before map five minutes before the final vote and vote that one in. Again, is this really that hard to understand? (also see rule #1)
#7 As an at-large boardmember, don't sell out your constiuents by making a deal with a partisan political orgainzation-the NAACP for instance, that you will give them what they
want in exchange for votes. If by chance you do, make sure the rest of your constituents don't find out about it.
These are just a few simple things you can do for starters. I'm sure other bloggers may have more. Let's join together with Mr. Johnson! STAMP OUT EFFIGY IN OUR LIFETIMES!!!!
Posted on April 2, 2006 10:45 AM
People run for public office for one reason:
POWER.
Power gets you money. Look at Alston and Jones if you have any doubt about that.
Posted on April 2, 2006 12:02 PM
Yes, they run for the POWER.
So what if the effigy designers currently have a black hotdog wiener hanging from Dot's mouth. That's nothing compared to what she has done to the kids in that area. She still has all the POWER and the paycheck.
Posted on April 2, 2006 12:19 PM
You're right Allen the schools should not have to fix all of these problems. Personally I would take all of the disruptive kids and throw them out of school for good. END OF STORY.
And as a point of clarification I believe it was witches in the woods by Southwest not Demons.
Posted on April 2, 2006 3:21 PM
I extrapolated that they were demons from photographs of the effigies. But perhaps you have inside information on the intent of the display, Buford. I stand corrected.
Posted on April 2, 2006 5:29 PM
Allen,
I don't see any effigies in other areas of Guilford County. Perhaps the key to this is to treat the people that you represent fairly and with respect.
If you dont then you had better be prepared.
Posted on April 2, 2006 6:48 PM
Attention freedom fighters; would someone please contact me via my Roadrunner e-mail with how to get the Susan Mendenhall car magnet. I saw one at Harris Teeter today and it will really look good on the back of a white MG.
Allen if you like the yard decorations you are going to love this magnet.....
Posted on April 2, 2006 8:12 PM
Buck,
About 10 freedom fighters have joined forces and paid for 500 of these magnets.
The upshot is to get at least 5 bucks for each magnet to help pay for the lawsuit against GCS.
Of course the other reason was to pay tribute the the 16 years of NON representation of our beloved school board member.
Posted on April 2, 2006 8:44 PM
Allen this blogging is great. I had an e-mail in under 15 minutes with where and when to pick up a Mendenhall magnet. As long as I'm there would you like me to pick one up for you? It would not be a problem and I'd be glad to put it on your car for you, since we work less than a few hundred yards apart.
Posted on April 2, 2006 8:48 PM
Allen, you said:
"We screw things up and expect our schools to fix them. Poverty. Drugs. Gangs. Illegal immigration. Segregated neighborhoods. Broken families. Homelessness. Suburban sprawl."
Finally! You get it! You actually mentioned some very real problems where we should focus our attention. For awhile it seemed that you believed that diversity would make these problems go away.
It also seems to me that your recent diversity comments contradict what you just wrote about expecting too much from schools. That seems to be exactly what you were demanding of them last week.
If we solve these problems or at least make progress on them, then you might see a lot of the negative effects of the "lack of diversity" as you claim, go away. You see, the real reason students fail in our schools is not because they aren't diverse enough, it's because of many of the problems you listed.
Posted on April 2, 2006 9:06 PM
Mr Spagnola,
Well said sir.
Posted on April 2, 2006 10:07 PM
Come on, Jennifer, don't make me wait.
Catholic girls start much too late
Sooner or later it comes down to fate
I might as well be the one.
I know I might have used a bad word or two,
Come on now, what's a guy to do?
If your kids got screwed,you'd be screaming too..
It's really not too much fun.
You had a nice white dress and a party on your confirmation,
You had a brand new soul, and a cross of gold.
But Jenny they didn't give you quite enough information.
Did you ever care about my kids?
Did you ever say a prayer for my kids?
Ohh, Ohh.
They saywe run with a dangerous crowd.
We ain't too pretty, we ain't too proud.
We might be screaming a bit too loud...
Posted on April 3, 2006 9:28 AM
Billy Joel Banned,
Jenny can't handle the truth...and I doubt that she's Catholic.
Posted on April 4, 2006 11:34 AM
Allen,
Confusing witches for demons by only looking at photographs reveals a problem experienced by your newspaper. The problem is lack of investigative reporting, and not doing proper fact-checking. Perhaps, the credibility of your newspaper would be enhanced if you did more of these things, rather than just producing editorials on subjects for which you possess insufficient knowledge.
Posted on April 5, 2006 11:31 AM
Hey, I only called it as I saw it ... they still look like demons to me.
I don't know that viewing them in person would give me any additional insight ... unless there's a sign that says: "These are witches."
Seriously, though, I hope my seeing the effigies as demons instead of witches doesn't impugn my newspaper's investigative reputation.
Posted on April 5, 2006 11:47 AM