What So Proudly We Hail

November 6th, 2003

It is often said that democracy is a poor form of government but it is better than the others. In a democracy, once the voters have spoken there is nothing to do but accept the result. And so I do. I congratulate the incoming members of the school board and promise to do my best to help them adjust to their duties and do good things for our schools. The campaign is over. We all need to get on with the difficult business of keeping the progress that has been made in the district over the last eight years and improving on it.

At the same time, along with my fellow incumbents, Dr. Linda Krentz, Bill Schellhaas and David Chapman, I will not go quietly into the night. We intend to put education first and we will do whatever is in our power to achieve our goal. We invite the community and especially parents to join us in this effort by attending school board meetings.

Democracy is a poor form of government because it relies on the notion that fully informed voters will make the right choice. Indeed, to that end the First Amendment was adopted. It was Jefferson’s theory that all arguments should be heard no matter how obnoxious because in the end the voters would reject the bad ones and good ones would be adopted. Unhappily, given the oligarchies that control the media, this is rarely the case.

In our own community, not only were the two local newspapers biased against the incumbent candidates, as I have previously explained at some length, but The Morning Call joined them. The Call refused to report, for example, that the settlement with Dr. Ralph Tarola had actually saved the district $170,000 as was demonstrated on a Power Point presentation at the board meeting immediately preceding the election. They also reported a number of the questions raised at that meeting but almost none of the board’s responses. Their own columnists and editorial writers were misled by their news stories. Thus freedom of information was suppressed and the voters could not make an informed choice.

It is probably true that even with the best press coverage, the write-in campaign would have failed. In the first place, money was always a problem. Second, the sheer mechanical difficulty of writing in votes was impossible to overcome. And finally, it is a truism of politics that whenever taxes are high, as they are in our district, the public blames the incumbents whether they are guilty or not.

And they were not guilty. School Taxes rose as high as they are because former boards spent almost no money on needed improvements and badly underpaid teachers, thereby losing some of the most talented. .To correct this situation, the district had to play catch up and did. The student population of the district rose sharply. Under state imposed PLAN-CON rules however the district had no choice but to build new schools to accommodate the number of students which the state estimated would attend and the state was wrong. Also, as my friend Andy Wilt has pointed out numerous times, the system of assessments in Northampton County is skewed in favor of wealthy taxpayers and unduly penalizes poorer ones; although the board has protested this unfair arrangement, the board is powerless to force the county to reform.

This list does not include the primary culprit: the state legislature. In order to maintain that they have not raised taxes, the members of the legislature have consistently lowered the percentage of their support of the schools forcing the school districts to raise their property taxes. Accordingly, almost all incumbents in the state have had difficulty retaining their seats in the anti tax wave. Citizens should be outraged at these tactics. Instead they have been misled by those who shamelessly exploit a really bad situation.

We must not leave this topic without celebrating the accomplishments of the previous board. Eight years ago a number of them ran for the first time for the school board under the motto: Restore the Pride. That is exactly what they accomplished and much more. I have detailed in a previous column what these accomplishments are. Here I only need to say that the retiring school board members, John Freund, Janie Hecker, David DeRemer, Mary Curtin and Tom Macarro have earned the praise, respect and gratitude of the community. Theirs was often a thankless job suffering the slings and arrows of an often uninformed and misled public. But they put in the endless hours of study, school service and board meetings their jobs required in order to serve our children. Theirs was a noble calling.. It was my privilege to serve with them. It is an honor to have them as friends.

I praise too, those board members who were part of the original Restore the Pride group or came thereafter but no longer serve on the board: Larry Angellili, Robert Kreps, Joe Kelhart and Steve Hanson.

It is hard to express, without tears in my eyes, my gratitude to our Save the Schools committee, led by chairpersons Jan McIntosh and Steve Mason. With surpassing courage, enterprise, hard work and unfailing optimism, Jan and Steve, with the others, kept alive the flame. Jan, Steve and the other members of the committee too large to mention are such good people. This community is truly blessed to have them.

Finally, our committee persuaded Sandra Miller to join the incumbents as a candidate. She was reluctant at first because she feared she would be unable to afford the time commitments if she were elected. Yet when she joined in she gave it her all out effort. Her contributions were enormous and she provided the ethical guidelines to which our campaign adhered. Sandy has come to practically every board meeting in the last four years as a children’s advocate. She has held the board’s feet to the fire on educational matters all that time with persistence, humor and grace. I know she will continue to attend and I look forward to seeing her for the rest of my service.

In the end, I am reminded of two quotes from Winston Churchill: “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.” And, “‘Not in vain’ may be the pride of those who have survived and the epitaph of those who fell.”