What do they want?
Are county leaders fabricating numbers and seeking more power just because they can?
Travis McGee once mentioned a particular type of no-see-um mosquitoes who swarmed but did not bite. He said the evolutionary question was, “What do they want?”
The difference with the Rockingham County School Board is that we can see them, but the question remains.
Watch the average school board meeting and see people discussing policy details, programming decisions, budget issues, teacher raises, and student accomplishments.
Watch a county board meeting and tell me what happens. I’ve suffered enough.
But a short review is in order. They banned 57 books, seven of which aren’t in their libraries. They’re still deciding on the rest, 15 months later, and they’re ignoring the recommendations of the secret committee they appointed to review the books. But let’s allow that to be a metaphor for the rest of their rushed changes and move on to MTC.
The MTC board consists of the five members of the Rockingham County School Board and the six members of the Harrisonburg School Board. To keep things even, one city member is supposed to be designated by the MTC board chair as non-voting at the beginning of each meeting. It’s rarely relevant, because most votes on most local bodies are unanimous, the “Yeah, go ahead” system of government. Some actions require votes, but that doesn’t make them interesting.
An exception was a majority of county members voting against a nomination for vice chair at a recent meeting. No reason was given. They just did. They could if they wanted to.
At that same meeting, those same members did not mention wanting to change the voting structure at MTC. The entire board did vote on a budget, unanimously and without much discussion relevant to the numbers, which the county board misstated in a press release two days later.
The misstatement of the numbers – the city pays 29 percent this year, and the release said 20 – takes us back to the issue of what they want. There are two possible reasons they got the numbers wrong. One is that they are exaggerating the county contribution because they’re using it to justify changing the voting structure to match, four votes to one instead of five and five. The other is that they don’t know how much the county is kicking in. This exposes another secret of local government. People sometimes vote on budgets and other complex issues without reading all of the documentation.
So the county board is using a number they got wrong, intentionally or not, to justify changing the way people vote on things. Wanting to change from a 50-50 vote to some other ratio suggests there is some policy or practice the county board wants to change, and that it’s one they expect the city board to vote against.
So, what is it? What do they want?
If there is a policy in controversy, do they not have a responsibility to let their citizens know what it is and what they want to change? If they do not want to change anything, why do they want more votes?
It’s a given that the city and county are moving in different directions.
In a 2003 delegate race, the Republican got 54 percent of the vote: 50 percent of the city vote and 58 percent of the county vote in the split district. Eighteen years later a different Republican in the same district got 60 percent; but the city vote had shrunk to 40 percent and the county vote had grown to 75 percent. County leaders regularly attend meetings of the City Elders, a group you could fairly call Christian Nationalists or Dominionists. The city recently dropped its opening prayer at council meetings as the city elected its first Muslim member. Some Broadway students openly wonder if it’s safe to go into the city. Some JMU students openly wonder if it’s safe to go to Elkton.
Perhaps those changes, that drifting apart, is at the base of the county wanting more power. Why should the city get to vote on their kids’ technical education? Why should the city get half the votes when they only pay 29 percent of the budget (rounded down by the county to 20)? Perhaps it is some matter of deep principle, even if they don’t want to state that principle, either because they think it’s obvious or they don’t really know how to articulate it. But it feels like the actions of a blustering schoolyard bully. Gimme, gimme, mine, mine, because I can.
Perhaps there are books or words they want to ban. Plumbing and other mechanical disciplines often refer to male and female connections when they could just as easily call them innies and outies. Are hair-styling classes referring to a French wave when they could just as easily say long, curly thing? Do they want to introduce a divinity track to the vocations taught?
Do they want more county students in the classes? They claim they do, but while falsely claiming they pay more than they do for those seats. Is the city paying 29 percent of the costs for 23 percent of the seats a reason for them to back away from that claim? Or will they simply change the numbers? The county’s superintendent took one day to back away from the 80 percent figure and claim 75, which might be laudable if the number were not 71. If we use their seats for dollars figures, is the city required to raise its portion of the student body from 23 to 29 percent? That’s going to mean finding about 20 more vo-tech students at each of the city’s high schools. On the other hand, if the city is driven out of MTC, the county will have to find 40 more vo-tech candidates at each of its high schools or begin shrinking the school.
Other than the arithmetically false claims of student-to-dollar equity, the county has expressed no reason for shifting its share of the votes, which would effectively shut the city out of MTC decision-making. Likewise, it is unclear why the county is considering building a new technical center without including the city in the planning process. Would they expect the city to pay some percent of the $75 million or so to build the new center, or do they plan to go it alone? When will they answer that question? Why is the planning of a new educational facility being undertaken by the county’s Board of Supervisors instead of its elected School Board?
The county is not answering or talking about these questions, possibly because they don’t have to. And it feels sometimes like that’s the whole story. We don’t have to tell you. We want the votes because we want them. We can, so we will.
We can only guess. Perhaps there’s a reason spoken only in parking lots after the public meeting but never while the mics are on. Maybe there’s a reason Rockingham County’s leaders don’t want their kids going to school with Harrisonburg’s. Nobody’s said it out loud, but it would explain a lot.