#22: The Village

"It takes a village to raise a child."

But what if the village doesn't want your help?

The message was sent, loud and clear. We already knew the answer, actually, though that didn't stop some of us from half-killing ourselves trying to change people's minds -- particularly Keith Meeuwsen, who deserves respect and gratitude for all his efforts. We knew that the operating levy measure here in St. Helens, which would have raised the property taxes about $180 per year for the average homeowner, was unlikely to pass. We knew that the town is quite desperately poor; our unemployment here was higher before and after the recession than the state or national averages; it peaked somewhere around 14%, and home prices took the same dive after the bubble burst, of course. We knew that the kind people of St. Helens had refused a measure in the last election that would have raised their property taxes something like $.07 per $1000 of home value (Average home value is about $150,000, so that would have been roughly ten dollars a year -- the price of a movie ticket or lunch for two at McDonald's.) in order to pay for a city employee to help local veterans find and access services provided for them by the various government agencies that offer help behind a wall of red tape. That's right: they didn't want to pay $10 a year for veterans. Local veterans, that is.

Oh, right: happy Memorial Day, everyone.

The St. Helens Schools Operating Levy went down by a vote of 2:1. 67% said no -- though that number is presumably skewed by the fact that the voter turnout was something like 30%. All the pundits said that was great, by the way, since this was only a local election for school boards and water commissioners and such, but I have to wonder what kind of society thinks it's great when 70% of its registered voters can't be bothered to take part in the democratic process. Especially since we have ballot-by-mail here in Oregon. Guess they didn't want to pay for the stamp. "44 cents to participate in my community and ideologically protect my freedom? Hell no! That's almost an extra shot of espresso in my cup of coffee!"

We didn't even get as many votes as there are children in our schools. Think about that for a moment.

So the message is loud and clear: the people of St. Helens do not want the school system they are provided. They are not interested in paying for it, and believe me, they do not, as a whole, take any interest in it or offer any assistance to those of us trying to offer education to their children. I'm not sure I can lay blame for that on the parents themselves, not entirely; this is a conservative town, which means they believe, by and large, that teachers are atheist pinkos trying to teach their kids to tolerate homolove (That's a quote from an online forum, by the way.), and it's a blue-collar town, which means that many of them think that all their kid really needs is a work ethic, if he's a boy, so he can find a good manual laborer job, or a husband if she's a girl, so she can have a good half-dozen children and raise them like good Christians. And then there's the fact that the town has higher-than-average rates of drug and alcohol abuse, and divorce and abuse and neglect, and more than its fair share of grinding poverty. And, most importantly, it has been like that for years: for decades. For generations. So the parents of these kids were not taught to value education, and they don't. 2:1.

Let me add, though: on an individual basis, whatever you were taught and however you were raised, you have your own brain and you are responsible for your own decisions. So even if Lars Larson told you not to vote for local school levies because them Commie teachers' unions steal too much of our tax money, and even if your one-toothed drunk of a father told you school don't matter nor nothin', you're still the one who marked that No bubble. Or, more likely, threw your ballot away. So it's on you.

Yes, I know: the best way to improve oneself, to improve the lives of one's children, is education. The best way to attract new business, and therefore employment, to an area is to improve the base education level of the new generations of workers. The best way to maintain property values is to keep public education solid -- our test scores have been going up, by the way, and the high school was rated Outstanding by the state last year, so don't think this is punitive or a local reenactment of No Child Left Behind. The schools are succeeding, and they still said no. Of course I know those things. I realize that voting down a local operating levy is counterproductive to a town's best interests, and conservative or not, blue-collar or not, the people of this town should know that. Apparently nobody taught them the basics of community management. Let me note, by the way, that the entire state of Oregon voted down operating levies for local school districts, all except Portland Public Schools. So this is not only a local problem, apparently.

The point is this: the people of St. Helens do not want what we offer their children. Whether it is because they think we are not important, that schools don't matter, or whether they are not willing to sacrifice any more than they already have to pay for schools, they just don't want it. On that last point: I've heard a lot of people talking about the poverty of the area, how people just can't afford higher taxes and that's why they voted No, and all I can say is: bullshit. There's no way that you are riding the ragged edge so closely that an extra $180 a year -- a YEAR, not a month -- is going to tip you over the edge. It might mean you have to eat cheaper one or two nights a month, or give up your beer a couple of nights a month, but it's not beyond the means of anyone who owns a home. Believe me, my family is pretty close to the ragged edge -- after all, I'm a teacher in a town that doesn't want teachers -- and Toni and I both voted for the levy, even though we don't have any children in the district and won't ever have any. Want to know why we did it? Our unselfish reason was our absolute knowledge that education is good for people, and should be paid for, if needs be. That education, along with medicine and public safety, are the fundamental strands making up the social safety net, and education is the only one that puts people in a position to escape reliance on that safety net. Our selfish reason was that we own a home in the area, and we'd like to be able to sell it for what we put into it. Plus, y'know: we're not stupid.

Okay, the people ain't buying what we're selling. That's offensive and disheartening, but fine: it means we will have to offer less. We will have to cut programs, cut art and music and PE at the elementary level, cut sports and extra-curricular activities at the upper grades. Right? I mean, that's how schools all around the country have handled budget shortfalls. I assume that's why people were willing to vote down the levy, because they think education costs too much as it is, that there are too many unnecessary frills. Plus that homolove thing. But that's the most rational response: the demand for our educational services is low. When the demand is low, and you can't increase it -- believe me, the teachers have tried to get people to understand how important education is; but at the most basic level, the best thing people can do for their kids (For their own kids! Do you believe that I'm fighting for other people's kids? And the ones I'm fighting against are the parents of those kids? I can't believe my job.) is teach them to read and give them access to books, and they don't even do that -- then the proper response is to cut supply, to scale back production to match the demand. Otherwise you produce a surplus, and the value of your commodity goes even lower. This is (apparently) a service industry, so if the people won't pay for our services, we offer fewer services. There is a baseline we have to stay above, after all, since education is a guaranteed right in this country for all children, so we cannot take on fewer clients. No, we should just give those clients less. Right?

Apparently not, according to my school board. No, their answer to the fiscal crisis in this district is this: lay it on the teachers. They want to continue offering the same services, and in order to keep high school sports and extracurriculars, elementary art and music and PE (Not that I'm in favor of cutting those last, I'm assuredly not -- but then, I voted for the levy.), they cut -- teachers. Seventeen of us, to be precise, which is about 10% of the total teaching staff, mostly at the elementary level, so they could raise class size rather than reduce programs. And then in addition to that -- in addition to that -- because we are in contract negotiations for next year, they made the following offer: freeze teacher salaries and benefits, and cut anywhere between five and fifteen days out of next year's schedule, thereby actually cutting teacher salaries between 2.5% and 8%. That's not including the 8%-9% cut we take from the benefit freeze, and the real-value cut we take from the salary freeze as the cost of living goes up. Our water and sewer bill has doubled in the past year, by the way. And I hear gas prices are kinda high.

It seems that my own supervisors do not want my services. They certainly don't want the services of the teachers they cut, including my colleague and classroom neighbor Ben Bleckley, who is being cut for the third time in his 2.5 years of service here in St. Helens, or Megan Riley or Danielle Gahr, two elementary teachers who are on the union bargaining team with me. And these are awesome teachers: Megan actually took my jar full o' Twinkies into her classroom and used them to teach her kindergarteners about the horrors of processed food, at least on some small level. (A little background: as an experiment, inspired by Supersize Me, in which Morgan Spurlock did a similar experiment with McDonald's food, I put two unwrapped Twinkies into a jar to see if they would mold or rot. They didn't, of course. This past September, the Twinkies turned five -- well, it's been five years since I put them in the jar; who knows how long they languished on a shelf before I bought them and unwrapped them -- and so I sent them to kindergarten.) Our reading scores at the high school went up 18% at the freshman level this past year -- and Ben teaches both Freshman English and the Reading/Literature Workshop, our intervention for struggling readers, and the crappiest class we offer in the English department, from a teacher's perspective. That thing almost killed me, and Ben's taught it for the last two years, and still teaches it with vigor and enthusiasm. There are plenty of other teachers involved, but want to bet that Ben had something to do with that nice test score boost?

Please note that Ben's cut was due to seniority, not a personal vendetta on the part of the principals or anyone else.

So without Ben there, with fewer teachers in the classroom at the high school, are we cutting the Reading Workshop class, which is, after all, an extra service that we provide for students in need -- it counts as elective credit, and isn't a graduation requirement -- so that we can keep our class sizes as low as possible? Nope. In fact, we're offering more sections of it next year than this past year. And along with that, both 10th grade Honors and 12th grade Honors are projected to have class sizes of 38-40 students. It's not just English, either -- they're keeping the Math workshop while they cut math teachers back, and they're bringing in new Social Studies electives while cutting the social studies department back. And of course, they are not saying that we can teach less in those classes next year; we will still have the same state-mandated standards, the same expectations of raising test scores and raising attendance and reducing discipline problems. We'll just have fewer days to do it in, and quite a bit less money to live on while we're teaching the children of people who refuse to pay us to do that.

And that's how we handle education around here. We won't pay for it, and we educators -- pardon me, I meant the bureaucrats who supervise us, as clearly education is not their top priority (Of course the largest part of the blame for the cuts does not fall on the principals, but on the school board and superintendent who set their priorities for them. And it should be noted that we already cut back electives pretty severely in the last few years; almost all of our elective teachers are either part-time or teach core subjects as well as electives.) -- would rather have teachers work harder for less money than give the people what they so clearly want: less education for their children. We kept sports and cut seventeen teachers.

"It takes a village to raise a child."

You know what, village? Raise them your goddamn self.