As a newspaper reporter, I spent a shocking amount of time in my career attending school board meetings around the country. I began to appreciate the fact that no matter where you were, you almost always had certain “type” characters in the room:
The guys in expensive suits representing (insert your favorite business that is making a ton of cash off their contract with the school district), the journalism students from the local university who were sent there by their professors to watch how edu-political sausage was made, the acting principal at a school who was hoping the closed-session would result in him/her being named “permanent” principal, the teachers unions reps who were always the first ones to arrive and the last ones to leave, the bureaucrats who had to sit through all these meetings even if they never were called on to contribute anything, the parents of the kids who were going to play the Star Spangled Banner on their clarinets to start the meeting, and the school board members who would gush and pat themselves on the back for running school systems where cute kids like that could learn music, etc.
But no matter where you go, you also find that one dude who gets up every year and rips the school board a new one because their spending is increasing too fast, they aren’t getting multiple bids from vendors, they aren’t reading the spreadsheets, etc. It is like clockwork every year: the budget comes out, and these guys within a day or two have digested the whole thing and can tell you in great detail how screwed up it is.
Former New York Education Commissioner Thomas Sobol, discussing his time as superintendent of the Scarsdale Schools, remembered one such gadfly in what I found was a very endearing tale retold in a Teachers College publication.
If you too, have routinely found yourself trying to stay awake at 3 a.m. during school budget deliberations, you’ll get a kick out of the anecdote, after the jump.
When Tom Sobol was superintendent of schools in Scarsdale, New York, there was a guy named Bob who came to all the budget meetings—the classic, thorn-in-your-side self-appointed public citizen who haunts town halls across the nation.
“Bob used to roundly excoriate us for violating the public trust, and I had to hand it to him, he did a great job at doing his thing—he knew the budget better than just about anyone except me,” says Sobol.
It’s a warm spring day, and Sobol, 75, who retired in 2006 as TC’s first Christian A. Johnson Professor of Outstanding Educational Practice, is talking with an interviewer in his new office on the second floor of Grace Dodge Hall. (He still teaches one course per semester.) He is a kind-faced man whom time has given the craggy features of an eagle, with a thatch of white hair atop his head. His voice is soft, the result of medicine he takes for a spinal cord disorder that has left him without feeling in his legs, confined to a powered wheelchair; however, his eyes are clear and steady.
“Well, then Bob’s wife died, and he stopped coming to meetings. And one year, we were going along, and I knew the annual budget hearings were coming up, and I thought, I wonder how Bob is doing. So I picked up the phone and called him. I said, ‘How are you?,’ and he said, ‘Well, it’s hard getting along without Jane.’ I said, ‘Are you up on your numbers?,’ and of course, he was, he wouldn’t have been anything else. I said, ‘Are we going to see you out there at the meeting?,’ and he said, ‘No, I can’t drive anymore.’ And I said—and this was before my own legs gave out—‘Listen, the meeting is at eight, I’ll come around beforehand and pick you up, and we’ll go over together.’ So I did, and we drove over, and the meeting went along, and around nine o’clock, he stood up and roundly excoriated us for violating the public trust. And afterward I drove him home. I’ve always felt good about that.”
School Board gadflies: Can’t live with ’em. count live without ’em.