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School Board Journal
November / December 1995
January / February 1996

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From the Boiler Room
By DAVID CARR and RICHARD W. SMELTER

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Whenever the board thinks it's gonna have a rough time with its audience, it holds the meeting at a different location than the district office. Sorta symbolic, I guess, like taking your spouse out to a restaurant to pick a fight as opposed to fighting at home. I suppose it's a way to keep the home turf neutral.

Sure enough, the board decided to hold its annual budget discussion here at Eastside Elementary. You know, this is the yearly meeting where the new budget for the district is trotted out by the superintendent and all the folks hold their breath. The Supe was hoping for a real quick meeting, with a few people sitting around all saying "Looks good to me" and "Let's let the board approve this one . . . it's a winner." Keck advised the Supe that he'd heard rumors that it wasn't gonna go quite this smooth. The Supe trusts Keck (well, most of the time), so he made plans to spend the following weekend at his second home on Lake Chester. That's where the Supe always goes after he gets a rough time on something. (He spends, therefore, a good portion of his weekends at Lake Chester.)

Well, the budget meeting started on an ominous note, what with the citizen taxpayer "watchdog" folks all out in front carrying signs, a second contingent from the teacher's professional organization, a bunch of angry parents, and a bus load of Sox fans whose bus broke down out in front they had nothing better to do so they just wandered in. This last group was the scariest. The Sox lost that afternoon. This had all the makings for a marathon board meeting, and that's just the way it turned out.

I noticed that mostly all the board members wanted to cut the line items of the budget down as far as they could, while the department heads and principals voiced their objections that the budget was too low in the first place. Keck, my boss, stood up and said he'd like modern, push-button phones in his building, but Ed Johnson, our most frugal board member, said that he reckoned rotary phones would do, adding that they'd have great resale value as antiques if we'd just hang on to them for about ten more years. He went on to expand on this idea. With the money gained by selling the rotary phones to antique dealers, we could make such a profit that we could afford new phones AND buy more ink for the inkwells. (This brought a hush from the audience and a few giggles. The board president spent the next few minutes showing Ed how a ball-point pen works.)

This was followed by Edna Smart, our staff computer whiz, who demanded more money for computers. Some of the staff pointed out that the students are already spending so much time at the terminals that the word "terminal" was taking on a different, and older, meaning. (You gotta understand, Edna is the kind of person who thinks that everything should be done on computer, even if it takes twice as long and you have no intention of saving it for later revision. She even brought a lap-top to the board meeting so she could send notes to her friends in a modern way. This was a good contrast to Ed, though sort of like comparing the worst of yesterday with the worst of today.)

Anyway, the meeting went on and on, far into the night, with the Supe looking sicker by the minute. The meeting was SO long that some people at home called the police and reported their spouses missing.

The general direction, however, was cut, cut, cut. Get the lowest bidder for everything. Seems like we in the schools are supposed to get by on less and less. You know, this "lowest bid" stuff is starting to bother me.

Next day, I talked to Keck about all this.

"You know, Gus," he said, "it bothers me, too. Is this the best we can do for the future educate our kids by looking for the lowest cost possible? If the quality warrants it, Gus, I think we owe our children the highest bidder. Sometimes I wonder how dedicated teachers and loving parents feel when they hear folks talking about running schools like a business is run, by giving "customers" the lowest price possible. Do we ever really get a chance to pass savings on to our customers? How many of us would feel good about placing our families in an automobile equipped with the cheapest tires we could find?"

"What do we do about all this?" I asked.

"We all have to work harder at getting out the true story about what we need to run our schools at a level of high quality and not treat children as though they were a part on a conveyor belt in some assembly line."

I thought about this a long time. It always pays to think about what Keck says. After all, he's the principal.

Gus, the custodian at Eastside Grammar, is the creation of David Carr and Richard W. Smelter.

David Carr teaches school administration at West Georgia College, and Richard W. Smelter is curriculum director for Manteno C.U. District 5 and principal of Manteno Elementary School.