Anyway, let’s see what we can do. If you know other folks who would be interested, I see a reason to rent/borrow a meeting room somewhere and organizing something. I may even go to the next WHTA meeting… depends on whether I know what I want to get out of attending.

Sujal

As someone who DOES have kids in the WHPS, and as someone who deeply believes in the covenant that we as a society have to provide a comprehensive public education, I want to thank you for your words and support here and over on the WH blog.

The issue of taxes in general is highly emotionalized to begin with, and add to those emotions a whole litany of sound bites of questionable veracity, and you get what we got in the budget referendum.

The WHTA (which I believe is largely funded by a $10 membership fee if their website can be believed) has done a remarkable job of developing an organization that successfully exploited the emotions and the sound bites, and while I hate the outcome, we need to salute them – and take a lessen from them as well.

We saw it in action over on the WH blog – I posted the link to the benchmarking of teachers’ salaries on the State Department of Ed website, and you further tried to engage the “No” voters in conversation about it. They weren’t interested in that type of conversation because their purposes (motivate No votes) are perfectly served by the sound bite campaign.

So I guess what I’m saying is I agree with you – we do need to become more proactive about our support. We also need to reframe the way we express that support – simpler and more straightforward. In addition, as someone who has tried to pay attention to both the Town and BoE budgets (the BoE being 60% of the overall total) I think that part of becoming proactive also means that we have a responsibility to make absolutely certain, through our elected officials, that the Town and WHPS administrations are being efficient stewards of the public’s funds, and then to effectively demonstrate that stewardship. Frankly though, I’m not yet comfortable myself that that stewardship is completely present – I still sense a degree of bureaupathic behavior (for example, the budget presentation by the School Administration is at the least confusing, and at worst intentionally obfuscatory).

But anyway – I’m not sure yet how to go about creating this sort of non-PTO/PTA advocacy group, but I agree it’s needed.