When adults drag kids into their disputes, it is despicable! When educators do so, it is worse.
It is bad that the bureaucrats who run Coeur d’Alene School District #271 demonstrate repeated contempt for voters. Every time they lose an election, they arrange for an immediate re-vote. They have no grace.
It is worse that, when the state of Idaho increases funding for every teacher by over six thousand dollars and funding for non-teaching school staff by over one third, our school district’s leaders call this a funding cut. They have no integrity.
It is even worse that these leaders publicly hold hostage everything dear in our public schools, saying pass the levies or the arts, electives, and sports will suffer! At the same time, they refuse to seriously consider cutting their bloated bureaucracy. They have no humility.
However, nothing comes close to their abuse of public trust by telling students that an educational Apocalypse will come to local schools because the NO voters hate kids. Encouraging High Schoolers to stage a walk out, and frightening younger students into pleading with their parents to vote YES, is a betrayal of everything a good teacher should be. They have no shame!
For thirty years, my vocation has been to help teach teens, including those with special needs and special gifts. I have learned that all young people need educators with grace, integrity, humility, and a capacity for shame.
Students need educators whose lives are a testament to good sportsmanship. In life, these educators must model that the means one chooses to solve problems matter more than any desired goals. Students deserve to learn from adults whose words, and deeds demonstrate that no momentary dispute is worth the desperation that betrays honor and denies truth.
No school official should be exhorting students to campaign for YES votes, certainly not during the school day. No school administrator should be checking up to see which district employees voted in March in order to get out the vote in May. No student walkout should be given lighter disciplinary consequences than previous walkouts because on this occasion students express a message convenient to district leaders.
Vitriolic rhetoric has poisoned this debate. District 271 Superintendent Dr. Shon Hocker was quoted in another local newspaper as stating that opponents of his levies were un-American. If the Levy vote in May once again is NO, this will be because district leaders have lost the trust of most voters.
Many good teachers, parents, students, and citizens have been caught up in the frenzied and hyperbolic assertions of the YES faction. They have accepted the fundamental assertion that only certain things can be cut within the current system.
It is this very system of contemporary education policy that needs to be abandoned. District 271 should sell real estate, consolidate district administration to at least 1/5 of its current levels, and return decisive powers to teachers and building principals.
It should abandon messianic programs to indoctrinate students and reform society through activist programs in schools. Discipline should replace Social & Emotional learning, and traditional curricula should be restored over Common Assessment-measured programs of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.The mythical Pied Piper of Hamelin once held a town’s children hostage to extort payment from its citizens. Save students from these latter-day Pied Pipers. Vote NO on all upcoming school levies!
