Jill Howard Church
School board meetings rarely attract capacity crowds, but a recent one in Fayetteville did just that.
What motivated parents and students to fill the chairs and line the walls was the prospect of closing one or more schools in order to trim the county budget next year.
What seemed like half the town of Brooks (population about 600) turned out to plead for their elementary school’s survival.
One by one, they spoke of their love for Brooks Elementary, the high educational quality and the deep social bonds, and how foolish it would be to shutter a recently enlarged school that continues to draw residents.
If the school is closed, asked one mother, "What's the point of staying here?"
Small towns can become big targets when the powers that be look for ways to cut costs; rural post offices are experiencing the same scrutiny lately. Even if everyone agrees that sacrifices have to be made, no one wants his own neck on the altar.
The quality of a school can make or break a community. When you’ve got a good one, you want to keep it, because so much happens there.
We don’t really learn all we need to know in life in kindergarten, but from the moment we enter our first classroom, we begin to learn the ways of the world.
We experience friendship and conflict, cooperation and struggle, work and reward. We meet people who look and think differently from us.
Elementary school is our first experience in a microcosm of the real world that we’ll spend the rest of our lives navigating.
We don’t always remember to play well with others, listen, share, or clean up our messes, but those lessons get planted nonetheless.
Back in grade school, we’re told that we’re all created equal, but you can probably think back and name at least one or two kids whom you knew wouldn’t amount to much and then truly never did.
But you could also pick out the leaders, the clowns, the jocks and the artists. Someday you’ll read about someone you recall as a geeky fifth grader who’s now president of her own business, or whose name is now on the side of a new hospital wing.
If churches are the soul of a community and the sports fields are the heart, the schools are the brain. These are the places where people come together daily.
The smaller the town, the bigger the school’s importance, and the harder you can expect parents to fight for it.
Fayette’s student population is fluctuating a bit, and declining property tax revenues affect the school system budget. This recession has been in the works since 2006 when the real estate bubble started to burst, and like any destructive force, it takes far more time to build something back than it did to knock it down.
It might be impossible for the school board to make cuts without drawing some blood, but the key is to not sever an artery.
Author Robert Fulghum wrote in his famous poem about kindergarten that “when you go out into the world, hold hands and stick together.”
That’s a lesson the folks in Brooks learned well.
Jill Howard Church has lived in Fayette County for 14 years. Reach her at jillptcblog@aol.com.
