Our local school district is a good place the witness the power money is having and is trying to have on the American political and social compact.
It’s a bit complicated to explain, but I will try. The Orange School District serves the residents of five communities and of small sections of some neighboring communities. We are located on Cuyahoga County's far southwest side, and comprise one of the more affluent areas of the county. There is relatively little poverty in our district, though there is some. I’d guess many of us are at least upper middle class, and the class category goes from there up to and including very, very wealthy. Why Maxine and I live here is another story, involving the church I was called to serve in 1989. It was not easy to live at or near the lower end of the income scale for the area, especially with two children going through the school system. Nevertheless, we have loved living where we live.
By far the wealthiest community in the Orange School District is Hunting Valley. Its 700 residents live mostly in homes you cannot see from the roads that make their way though the wooded landscape. Imposing gates keep unwanted visitors away. The homes you can see are large and beautiful, and just the landscaping around those closed gates is often spectacular.
Our current president has glad-handed folks in at least one of Hunting Valley’s estates. Donors have, in general, been very generous to Republican candidates, through I read that at least a few Democrats call Hunting Valley home.
As the most recent Ohio state budget was being considered by our legislature, the senator representing Hunting Valley (and other nearby communities) slipped into it an amendment to lower the property tax rate for Hunting Valley residents. This idea has been reported to have been under consideration by some Hunting Valley political leaders for some time. Apparently the fact that Hunting Valley sends very few children to the Orange Schools (in part because many of the relatively few school-aged kids who live there go to private schools) was deemed sufficient justification for the proposal. Some say now that many of the residents did not know anything about this plan; I have not heard anyone own up to being in the dark about it.
Had that amendment become law, it would have cost our district some $3 million per year in tax revenue, and it would have paved the way for other communities in other school districts to try to do the same thing. It would have meant either that our highly-regarded school system would have had to make significant cuts in what it offers, or to ask the rest of us to make up the difference via an increase in our tax rate.
Fortunately, Republican Governor Mike DeWine noticed the last-minute amendment, and vetoed it. I don’t agree with lots of things he is doing, but he seems at least to be a decent human being, with a sense of fair play. The offending state senator has admitted the way he did what he did was not the best.
You might think that would have ended it, but you’d be wrong. It’s school board election time. Two incumbent candidates with long histories of involvement in the Orange Schools were on the ballot for the two vacant positions. Then, a third candidate, this one a resident of Hunting Valley, threw her hat in the ring. She is on the faculty of Cleveland State University, where according to her publicity, she does outstanding work, including developing programs to help students who have come from poorer school districts succeed. She has also been successful in “doing more with less.” I have no reason to doubt her accomplishments in higher education.
But she offers no claim of experience with the Orange School District, or with any other public school system. She has no children, so she’s never even been a parent of a school student. She has not denied the charge that she’s never stepped foot in an Orange school, nor attended any meetings of the School Board or any of its committees or working groups.
What she has done is focus on statistics that show that Orange students do not do as well on standardized tests as do students in other top-ranked school districts, and the fact that the per pupil cost in Orange is one of the highest in Ohio. There are solid responses to her charges. I will not review them here, but I can share them with you if you are interested.
I will say this: our two daughters received outstanding educations at Orange, educations that served them well when they went to college, and into their lives and careers. They enjoyed many opportunities for enrichment in school, and their teachers and guidance counselors were almost always excellent and willing to work with them personally when they needed it.
Back to the money: I first became aware of the Hunting Valley candidate when news came out that she’d held a fund-raiser at a local Country Club, attended by many of Hunting Valley’s powers-that-be. Contributions of $500 and up rolled in. Her first financial report reveals that she has raised some $29,000 for her campaign, while her two opponents have raised $3,600 and $2,400. When asked about the disparity, the Hunting Valley resident candidate pointed out with pride that “no one has ever raised as much as me.” Among other expenditures she reported $11,600 as going to a public relations firm for “outreach.”
The election is next week, and our school district race has been the topic of many neighborhood discussions and several articles and opinion pieces in our local paper and even in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. I think there is significant support for the two incumbents, for whom I have already voted. In a public forum, I heard their responses to their challenger’s concerns, but they haven’t done much to counter her criticisms more widely. I worry that voters who simply see the stats she cites will vote for her. We’ll see what happens.
No matter how this very local election turns out, it is a great object lesson in the place of money in our political process, here for all of us to see. How much greater it is on the state-wide and national scale! And how desperate “the 1%” must be to separate themselves from the merely well-off, as have Hunting Valley’s leaders. What are they afraid of losing, behind their closed gates? Why do they feel they should be excused from full proportional participation in the education of our community’s children?
Thinking and writing about this has, however, made me face where I stand in the hierarchy of privilege and wealth in our nation and world. It’s satisfying to take self-righteous pot-shots at those who have more than you do. It’s not so satisfying to realize how much more you have than the largest portion of the human race, and to seriously wonder how they view you and the way you use money to take advantage of them. After all, you are just protecting what’s yours. Who can argue with that?
Or is it mine only, really?
I will let you know how our school board election turns out.
