[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]Rudderless is the dominant concept of the new School Board.
Members should spend the rest of the month collecting training wheels, canes, crutches, skateboards, discount sailing lessons, water wings — any device that will keep the leaderless Board from drowning.
O captain! My captain!
While Walt Whitman perspires in his grave, the School Board, at an inconvenient moment, is bound to founder.
The removal of the entire leadership team — Steve Gourley by choice, Scott Zeidman by voters —brings a crisis into clear, scary focus.
If the School Board were a movie, picture a race car careening around a track. For the last two years, Mr. Gourley and Mr. Zeidman have been alternating turns at the wheel. For the previous two years, they also were at the wheel, just less officially. Meanwhile, the other three members of the Board are crowded together in the backseat.
Some of us are leaders, some followers.
This is the way we are born.
Nutty wannabe groups like the National Organization of Hard-up Women, no matter how much they flex their manly muscles, can’t change the DNA.
The School Board not only has been robbed of its leaders but in the same dark moment subtracts 40 percent of its institutional memory. As the City Council has seen, that seemingly amorphous loss can be a terrible handicap.
Wake Me When It’s Over
In recent months, the formerly slumbering community has awakened to the four hotly argued capital improvements projects. Last seen, the advocates were in the gear of steam.
Even though the cigar-chomping, derby hat-wearing, beer-swilling, unshaven, poker-playing Mr. Gourley and Mr. Zeidman, unbeknownst to the inattentive public, have been meeting every Friday at midnight the past 48 months, plotting secret, devious strategies for pulling off the capital improvements their way, a darned tattletale found ‘em out, squealed, and now the whole community wants in on it.
Drat.
Who on the new School Board is going to stand up to the community when they become too insistent? And they will because that is the mission of advocates.
This is a major personal challenge, one of a half-dozen daunting ones voters may have overlooked.
Will anyone on the new Board be able to summon suffiicent courage to look the loudest voices in the mouth and the eye and tell them, without blinking:
“We welcome your opinions, but that is your limit. You elected us to make decisions. If you don’t agree, you may vote us out of office. Until then, I and we will make decisions— with the aid of our data — that are best for the community.”
I hope Nancy Goldberg was joking on Election Night when she talked about how wonderful it would be to have four women out of five on the School Board.
Imagine if a man said that.
She also celebrated the new composition of four educators and one lawyer.
If that is desirable, why bother with an election? Convene a clutch of teachers around the nearest water fountain and decide how you are going to run the School District.
Who will be the adult in charge?
Or will there be one?