Politics of poisoning a community

City council, ballot questions, and school board races in 2021 carry the taint of national level political rhetoric - and we'll all be the worse off for it, if we allow it.

There’s an election coming up - and by design it’s not framed in the normal hyperbolic partisan hackery. It’s designed that way because the election is for city government and school board - and when it comes to our local communities, and our children, someone way back realized it would be best if we all focused on the issue at hand, instead of the political rhetoric that typically afflicts elections.

But this is 2021, and we live in an era where everything is political. And I mean everything. There’s a radio show I sometimes catch, and they play a game called “How many comments until it turns political” or something along those lines. The punchline is that no matter the topic, no matter what someone posts on social media, it only takes three or four comments before someone interjects with a snarky partisan comment - which totally sucks the fun out of the original post and conversation.

We’re not immune to that in Kansas, or in Hutchinson.

I’ve read the news accounts about how “dark money” has entered school board races across the state - and across the country. This has turned the conversation away from the typically boring matters of school budgets and accepting small gifts for libraries or the football booster club into an all-out, old-school political brawl.

Campaigns for school board now seem to center on things like masks, remote learning, and other temporary, pandemic-induced anxieties. When this is over, I think we will still agree that we’ll want and need public schools to educate our children. I certainly hope our memories aren’t so short that we have forgotten that merely a year ago, people were worked into a lather because we NEEDED schools to watch our kids so we could work.

I’ll get back to this, but it’s not just school board races that are getting pulled into the industry of political gamesmanship.

Here in Reno County, the local Republican party is promoting a slate of candidates for city council. These “chosen” candidates have seemingly coordinated their campaigns, they mimic one another’s talking points, and they often appear together at community events - and not just like randomly showing up to the same place. Like at the Reno County GOP booth during community events in town. And they are promoting these candidates against other Republican candidates running for the same positions in what’s supposed to be a non-partisan race.

Then I started seeing the “Vote No! Stop 5 - Keep 3” signs around town, regarding the ballot question to expand the county commission from 3 members to 5. I wondered who would be so vehemently against that - and then I saw the chatter on social media from the Reno County Republicans Facebook page, with a post to “stop government overreach, preserve finances and access to elected officials.”

And I thought to myself - how is this a partisan issue? It’s a question - and one that’s been discussed before, going back to 2015 and earlier. Back then, while there was robust discussion and ultimately a decision to not place the question on the ballot - it was never presented as a partisan issue.

Because it’s not. Or it shouldn’t be. And neither should how we educate our community’s children - because local questions, children, and city council aren’t matters of politics, they are matters of community. And if we allow politics to poison this well, we might not have any good water left to drink.

Yet here we are. In 2021. Where everything is political. So much so, I bet there’s some debate just waiting to be had about the political leanings of Android users vs those who exclusively use Apple products.

The Reno County commission question

This is really a simple question - and like I said, it’s not a new question. It was raised in 1998 by a group of local business leaders, and again in 2015 when then County Commissioner Dan Deming - who for decades carried the banner of Hutchinson’s most conservative conservative - elevated the issue.

He wrote a recent editorial on the issue that’s worth reading.

I also wrote for Hutchinson News in support of the expansion at the time. I thought it was a good idea then, and I think it’s a good idea now. And it has nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with modernization, better representation, and the dilution of power. I am always more comfortable with more, not fewer, people in control of things. I think it forces better conversations, better thought, and ultimately, more cooperation to advance policy. Dilution of power is almost always better for the average person.

And it really should go without saying that the fewer people a person represents, the better access constituents have to the person representing them. I thought Republicans loved the idea of “government closest to the people govern best” but maybe in this environment that’s not the case. A five-member commission splits the electorate up - and I think that will bring more input, better creativity and perspective, and allow for more direct influence on county government than what a three-member committee can offer. And still - they’ll have to work together to secure three votes to advance any policy. I think that’s better all around.

And don’t even start with the expansion of government bit. The county commission voted to decrease their salaries to make going to five members cost-neutral, so that’s a non-issue. This isn’t an expansion of government - it’s a division of government amongst more people. That, in my view, works better.

Historically, the county commission has pulled two members from the broader Hutchinson area, with one member from the rest of the county’s rural areas. This year, there are two somewhat rural commissioners and one from the city. That’s the outlier, though. Nickerson, Arlington, Turon, Plevna, Langdon, Pretty Prairie have in the past not had a local person on the commission. I also think going to five members could address that - and that’s the same thing I thought in 2015, before the world decided to make sock choice an indictment on political preferences.

There is one concern I, and others share, and that’s the ability of an expanded commission to have a form of quasi-serial meetings where two members of the commission could talk without violating open meetings laws - and one that can be worrisome on city councils that have five members. I have written about the problem with such meetings before, and my position on that hasn’t changed. It needs to be avoided, and watched over by the public.

Vote how you want - but please, don’t vote a certain way because some political machine or hack has told you how you ought to vote. This isn’t a political issue; it’s a simple question of do you think the county will work better with three members or five? Do you think that government closer to the people is better? Do you think that power diluted is better? Or on the other side, do you think this makes government less responsive, more clunky, and more inefficient? Those are the sort of questions that should guide your decisions - not the political jersey that one team or the other is wearing.

There’s some good, straightforward information about the ballot question on the Reno County website.

So….School boards

If I allow myself, in this area I’ll fall down a rabbit hole of despair.

In my time working for The News, school boards were one of those things that were rarely controversial. Mostly it’s a board of people who aren’t political at all, but want to “give back to the community.” They are moms, grandfathers, uncles and aunts - people who care about one of the most important, and most visible, parts of any community.

And in the past two years, there has been no single group of well-intentioned, community-minded do-gooders who have been more maligned with toxic public rhetoric than volunteer members of school boards.

Traditionally, when there was a controversy - such as when USD 308 decided to abandon Roosevelt Elementary School years ago - candidates would run on that issue. And if they won, they elevated discussion on their cause. But they listened, and learned, and saw the challenges the district faced. They still stood up - valiantly - for their core issue. But they were open-minded and pragmatic. They respected the district as a whole, and saw that their role, now that they had won office, was to represent the interests of all the children in a district - not just those who attended one school or another.

Nowadays, we face something much more insidious than the committed parent determined to protect their neighborhood school. We face a juggernaut of money and power, financing a long-range plan to turn your tax dollars for public education into a profit center for private firms. And school board races have sadly adopted the language of national-level political campaigns.

The Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council has long made its desires about education known - this group believes that public dollars should be routed to private schools. At one of ALEC’s legislative conference’s earlier this year, presenters discussed a plan to leverage parent angst about masks, remote learning, etc., into a push to expand state-level passage of voucher programs for private schools.

I think the saying is never let a good disaster go to waste. And in this case, some of the richest people in the world have decided to use the hardships of the past couple years for political advantage.

Hence, there are a load of Political Action Committees around the country, and in Kansas that are working to get their candidates on school boards.

If I were to speculate about the long term strategy here, I would say that the high level support of elections today have little to do with masks, vaccines, or remote learning. Those are issues that can be used to achieve a higher goal - and that is seating a bunch of school board members who will gladly argue against robust funding of public education.

If the 2021 elections seat a bunch of anti-education folks on school boards across the country, when conversations ensue in the coming years about how to equitably and effectively fund education - these folks will likely argue that schools could do with less money. That private schools are the way to go. And we’ll watch a U.S. institution - one that has made us exceptional in the world - fall victim to commercialization and a sort of educational caste system where only people with means can afford effective education.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Koch and the tentacles of their various groups over the years, it’s that they are always thinking years into the future. What they do today has very little to do with today, and almost everything to do with what is coming. This group wants to turn your tax dollars into profit, and they’ve been working on this for ages. And they are happy to throw money at candidates who might be running with authentic concerns to advance the broader nationwide goal of undercutting education.

Now, that’s not to say that we can’t and shouldn’t be having conversations about how to make education better, more modern, and how to achieve better results for more students. We should always be seeking that. But that isn’t the conversation we have, frankly. In last year’s legislative session, we saw attempt after attempt to punish schools in a way that routed public education dollars to private schools.

Most of us, however, will always rely on public schools for our children. We can’t afford private school - and there’s not enough capacity to handle a sizeable population of students throughout the country. In some parts of Kansas, public school is the only option. I’ll never understand why rural folks get on board with some of this nonsense - because their small town schools will likely be the first on the chopping block of funding strains.

Again, vote your own way on school board - but don’t let slick postcards or rhetoric-laced ads sway your decision. Schools are a vital resource in any community - and the all-volunteer boards that guide schools make important decisions for our children. I think we can all agree that well-educated children are critical to our future well-being and prosperity; it always has been. I hope you’ll let that truth - an an honest examination of which candidates will genuinely work for your children’s benefit - guide your ballot decisions instead of some ginned up talking points aided by industrial, machine-style politics.