[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]Do you know what the School Board had for dinner last night?
Baloney.
A truckload.
We know the Board gobbled every calorie because they didn’t have the public relations sense to toss a single crumb to protesting parents pleading for a skinny strand of encouragement.
Their unsubtle strategy for shooing away those ubiquitous parents from El Marino Language School may be working.
Board member Laura Chardiet’s four-legged proposal of two weeks ago turned her into an outcast and her teammates – magpies, normally – turned into Van Goghs, three of them.
If you can imagine a visit from your ex-wife the day after returning from your honeymoon with her worthy successor, that is the level of discomfort the School Board felt being in the same setting with those pesky parents.
I used to cover insecure football coaches. They craved discussing their so darned extremely complex games the same way the Ugly Left approaches the silly-putty science of climate-warming-global-change. Even though no one in their camp employed or understood words longer than one syllable, they said it was too dense for normal people to penetrate.
I had the identical impression last night. The ardently union-sympathetic section of the School Board looked the elephant directly in his bloodshot eye. “Nah,” they said in unison, “we do not see you.”
You would have thought Ms. Chardiet’s path-clearing proposal to protect El Marino’s adjuncts and similar programs at all schools had been condemned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or even Al Gore.
They are supposed to be arbiters for the people, wise, objective leaders, not hyper-partisans.
I have no doubt all of them have their minds made up – which is fine, as long as they have sound reasons.
Already a month of shadow-boxing has passed. So far only Ms. Chardiet has been a stand-up person. We could hire The Muppets to occupy the other chairs while the real Board members go out and purchase spines.
Treat them as if they are dignified members of the community. They are not the enemy, not odious carriers of terminal diseases, just rivals.
As for the El Marino teacher who rebuked parents for not only disagreeing with the Board’s ice cold shoulder toward parents but horrors, daring to mention recall. How impudent of them to disagree with wise people who are wrong and insufficiently sensitive. Forsooth.
