William Marvel: Microcommunities

The object of the committee was to determine whether it was feasible and prudent to move the sixth grades into the middle school and close one of our three elementary schools. Discussion revealed broad agreement among members of the budget committee and school board about what is undesirable or unacceptable — additional student transitions from one school to another, for example, or long bus rides. The committee finally decided that the changes could and should be made, but the vote fell almost exactly as I had predicted when the committee was formed, based on the various members' previous decisions on services and funding. 

Conservative projected savings from making more efficient use of our under-enrolled K-8 facilities would start with nearly $1.2 million in annual operating costs, mostly in personnel. All operating costs are climbing inexorably, and sometimes precipitously. This year, fuel costs alone rose 43 percent at each elementary school. On top of that, we would avoid millions of dollars in periodic maintenance, and realize substantial potential revenue from selling a facility. 

We two from the budget committee could not see the sense of continuing to operate three elementary schools when two could easily handle the steadily-shrinking K-5 student population. The most budget-conscious member of the school board agreed. Another member of the school board, whose occasional indications of fiscal restraint left me wondering how she would vote, could not decide how to vote herself. The third school board member fulfilled my original expectations with impassioned opposition. 

In resisting any reductions in the budget, school champions use — and need — only two arguments. A reduction is either too sweeping, and will devastate the system, or it's too small to warrant any changes. Those two strategies cover all possible proposals, and fuel the skyward trajectory of our school budgets, despite steadily declining enrollment and academic performance. 

The arguments against closing a school this time were that it would save too little, even amid the most auspicious circumstances since the idea was first studied. Ignoring millions of dollars that would not have to be spent on future maintenance, as well as annually increasing savings from soaring operating costs and the proceeds from selling a school, opponents lowballed the savings at $180 per taxpayer the first year — when the savings would be lowest. Following Plan B of their playbook, they considered that deliberately minimized benefit too small to consider closing one of our "community" schools. 

The reference to "community" schools, and one administrator's comment that students (and their parents) are "the people we're working for," betokened a school lobby that seems to consider itself separate from — and essentially unaccountable to — the rest of us. I suppose that reflects the consequence of a national trend of fragmentation within the larger community, which was accelerated in Conway by our socially corrosive and all-consuming tourist economy. 

As gentrification and increased taxes forced out successive economic strata of the local working class (and the industries that employed them), the population void was filled to crowding with urban and suburban refugees seeking the Dream promised in the promotional brochures. Those refugees often brought with them too many of the expectations and attitudes from their former communities to fit in with what was left of ours, so they sought truncated substitutes. Those who came with children usually found community in the local schools, and for many that parochial network became central. Somewhere along the way, the schools began to reciprocate, focusing narrowly on current students and their parents. Except as a revenue source, everyone else became superfluous. 

The maxim about a village being necessary to raise a child is evidently obsolete. All you really need is a corps of well-paid professionals, widely distributed for maximum convenience.

William Marvel lives in South Conway.