One voice is not enough

Published 10:49 pm Thursday, August 11, 2016

You’ve probably heard the moniker the “Do Nothing Congress.” Many would say that is not such a bad thing. If our elected officials are doing nothing, they probably are not hurting us.

Unfortunately, if that same moniker is applied to your local school board the perceived benefit could be much more detrimental to the community.

Local school boards need to be proactive, engaged and open to the public. However, the Dalton Board of Education is far from that.

For at least four years the school overcrowding issue has been on the front burner. There have been community group meetings, consultants, public meetings, work sessions and as of the fall of 2016 no definitive decision — or even agreement on the data that would drive the decision — has happened.

For four months we have had a split board that could not always agree on a budget, or even how much weight to give to state test scores that have been out for four years.

This led to a battle on the future of the superintendent and months of “should we” or “shouldn’t we” keep him from a couple of board members. All the while the board meetings were nothing but staged comments and public fighting.

Wednesday night, the board members spent four hours supposedly only discussing the future of the superintendent. After four hours they exited with nothing to show for it other than a vague plan to work together and speak with one voice. If we only wanted one voice we would have a one-person board. They each are grown adults and elected officials and should communicate to their constituents without hand-holding.

After all this we say it is time to get to work. The board members have four months until the end of the first half of the 2016-17 school year. Let’s have a real plan that addresses the reality that our kids have been well below the state average in reading for the last four years at all levels measured (third, fifth and eighth grades and high school). This has to be acknowledged and a plan needs to be shared with the citizens that contains real, measurable benchmarks. The testing the state uses may not be perfect, but we should not be behind the state average ever.

We have a highly-funded school system, with high community involvement, great facilities and a top-tier teacher population, all the ingredients necessary to be successful.

We just need honest and hard work from realistic leadership to get us to being great again.