School Board Politics: On Policy and Community

While I was going door-to-door last week, one Madison resident came to the porch, glowered at me, and said, "I hate politicians." I didn't have a clever response. I just handed him my card and let him go back to his peaceful evening.

I heard a similar sentiment in the beginning of a letter to the editor in Friday's Madison Daily Leader that was highly critical of my character and my run for the school board (sorry, 'Netizens -- Jon Hunter doesn't put that content online, either). A Heather Devries wrote, "For the last 6 years, I really have not followed the local elections. Furthermore, it was not peculiar that I had paid no attention to who was running for the school board...."

At that point, I lost interest in the letter, because I heard the letter-writer doing the same thing as the man who had nothing to say to me but that he hates politicians. Those folks were disengaging from the real political process and, essentially, from their community. They'll occasionally declare their hate, maybe discuss personalities, but they won't talk real politics.

Politics isn't personal sniping or Archie Bunker one-liners. Politics is, as my wise-beyond-words wife is fond of saying, "how we live together." In other words, it's how we figure out how to act as a community.

By that definition, politicians aren't outsiders or others; politicians are us, all of us, neighbors coming together to figure out just what the heck we're going to do with a six-million-dollar budget, two big buildings that need upkeep, a couple hundred staffers who need good working conditions, and, last but not least, a thousand-plus kids who are counting on us to give them a good education.

With issues that important, why wouldn't you follow local elections? Why wouldn't you be a politician yourself and engage your neighbors in important conversations about actual policy?

Folks can gossip about personalities and the past all they want. But gossip -- and even worse, disengaging from the local political process -- still won't answer the hard and important questions about the present and the future: How much should we tax? What should we teach? What should we pay? What should we build?

Those are the questions that matter. Those are the questions that I've been talking with people about here on the Madville Times for a couple years and on Main Street Madison for much longer. Those are the questions we citizens must address to do right by our kids and our teachers.

Those are the questions that make me want to serve on the school board and be part of that public conversation.

That's why I'm running, Madison (and Junius, and Winfred, and Orland, and everyone else in the district), and that's why I want your vote tomorrow.

Madison Central School Board and Madison City Commission election: Tuesday, April 8, downtown city armory, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. See you at the polls!