He may get my vote after all

Below is the actual text of an email I received tonight from a candidate running for a position on my local school board. As I've said before, even though we homeschool we also pay public school district taxes. Because of this, we have a vested interest in how those monies are used.

I wrote to the candidate to find out his position on academics. His website featured some fairly solid sounding proposals to reduce or eliminate fiscal folly in the district, but he said nothing about his views on things like teaching to the test, kids who don't get to use math textbooks in the early elementary grades (they get worksheets instead), or the ghastly amount of money spent per student in grades K-12 only to have a significant percentage of those students graduate and still require remedial help before actually starting their college careers.

I asked him about all these things in detail, probably the longest email he's received the whole time he's been campaigning, and I actually got a reply. Here is what he said:

Marjorie,

Thanks for the email. You covered a lot. Let me try to wrap it up by saying we as parents have experience several of the things you described. Worksheets that have no books for parents to help or follow along. As a business owner, employing mostly young men we have seen time and again that they have a diploma but cannot read. We have one young man right now in his mid 20's that we cannot send to a technical school for doing suspension work and alignments because he cannot read well enough to get it done. He graduated from Langham Creek High School.

I support basic education methods. Traditional methods more than a lot of what is going on today. We have met many teachers that spend more time than appropriate accomplishing bureaucratic paperwork rather than taking care of business. These issues are important to me. I will do my best to address these issues.

I wrote back to thank him for actually taking time to respond to my email. I also told him that if he can summon the courage to ask the hard questions that really need asking, he may find himself on the school board for many years to come. We need local education leaders with spines, not the blah, blah back-slapping 'bots I've had the extreme misfortune to observe in years past. When I worked as a newspaper reporter and routinely covered local school board news in another community, I was always pissed at how those meetings ran so late into the night and wasted my time in the process. Little of anything substantial was ever discussed. It was the equivalent of fiddling while Rome burned.

I've never attended a school board meeting in the community in which I now live. Between raising four children and homeschooling two of them full-time, I've sorta had my own school district gig going for the past five years. Maybe I should branch out, though, and go see what my district officials are or are not discussing, eh?

At any rate, like I told the above referenced candidate, until my local elementary schools quit using worksheets instead of real books and threads (yes, you read that right) instead of real or plastic coins to teach money counting, I'm going to continue to assert that public education has fallen far and fast from its original purpose. Until the schools in my community restore art and music as "real" subjects rather than give them cursory treatment on a bi- or tri-weekly basis, I'm going to keep bitching about the lack of a well-rounded education being delivered up at my expense.

I wish the candidate well and, based on his willingness to admit the truth about what goes on in my local schools, I will probably vote for him.

And then, I'm going to watch him like a hawk to see if he'll be among the few who actually put their money where their mouths are.