From the early days of one room school houses to the present, town residents and tax payers have been directly involved in their students’ education. Act 46 takes this role away from us.
The Dummerston community has built and paid for its school building and grounds. All decisions pertaining to our school are made annually by Dummerston residents by discussion and Australian ballot.
Implementation of act 46 completely removes the people from direct decision making about their children’s education. Furthermore, our schools will lose their identity as community centers.
Act 46 is being enacted without any information provided to the public, nor does the public have the opportunity to give input or feedback.
Dummerston’s Act 46 committee representative made it a point to tell the town’s residents there would be no discussion of Act 46 at our town meeting. Parents, taxpayers or any Dummerston resident has not been afforded information regarding an unprecedented change in ownership in education of Vermont’s young people.
Please contact and ask your Act 46 town representative Alice Laughlin and WSESU Act 46 committee chair or superintendent Ron Staley why this information has not been provided to the general public at an organized town meeting.
Do we want to take the public out of public education?
Dummerston town resident,
Read Miller
Agree on 46
The passage of this legislation caught a lot of citizens by surprise. Guilford’s rep to the Vt House voted against it, & I believe the 3 Brattleboro reps did, also. Somehow a majority went for it, along with the Governor. Currently, the meetings are about whether our district should buy into it now (and get a tax bonus) or be forced to consolidate later, but there has been no mechanism for those of us (and I think the number would be much higher if more of the public actually understood that this legislation abolishes our Town School Boards) who wish 46 could be repealed.
Waking Up Yet Sheep?
You folks talk as though there’s local control in Vermont. Let me give you a heads up. There isn’t any. You lost it about 20 years ago if not longer. ACT 60 was just the beginning. Actually it could be stated that it started with ACT 250. You gave up your decisions when you decided to vote Progressives into the state legislature. Most of these folks know waay better than some local hayseed that grew up here. They’ve been enlightened by their albatross governments where they came from. Remember the statement “Take Back Vermont” it had more to do with local control than civil unions.
Learn to let others think for you. Just keep paying to be good citizens.
Rabbit Seasoning
“the meetings are about whether our district should buy into it now (and get a tax bonus) or be forced to consolidate later”
A bit like the Bugs and Daffy cartoon Rabbit Seasoning, where they argue over how Elmer be hunting:
Bugs Bunny: Would you like to shoot me now or wait till you get home?
Daffy Duck: Shoot him now! Shoot him now!
Bugs Bunny: You keep outta this! He doesn’t have to shoot you now!
Daffy Duck: He does so have to shoot me now!
[to Elmer]
Daffy Duck: I demand that you shoot me now!
[Elmer shoots him.]
and
Daffy Duck: Let’sth run through that again.
Bugs Bunny: Okay.
[in a flat tone]
Bugs Bunny: Wouldja like to shoot me now or wait till you get home?
Daffy Duck: [flat tone] Shoot him now, shoot him now.
Bugs Bunny: [flat tone] You keep outta this. He doesn’t hafta shoot you now.
Daffy Duck: [with sudden passion] Ha! That’s it! Hold it right there!
[to audience]
Daffy Duck: Pronoun trouble.
[to Bugs]
Daffy Duck: It’s not: “He doesn’t have to shoot *you* now.” It’s: “He doesn’t have to shoot *me* now.” Well, I say he does have to shoot me now!
[to Elmer]
Daffy Duck: So shoot me now!
[Elmer shoots him]
Would you like the thing you don’t want now, or later? You have a choice!
Bigger not better
Gov’t business types always like to talk about economies of scale but I’m not sure that qualitatively bigger is always better. From what I’ve seen, the bigger an organization gets, the more its power and control become centralized. Centralized power is almost never representative and resists grassroots involvement. It’s one thing if the organization in question is a publicly-traded corporation, but quite different when it’s a government entity funded by taxpaying citizens. Taxpaying citizens are supposed to have a say in how the money will be spent. Pulling school systems into multi-town aggregates reduces what little local control we have over our schools.
Accountabiity suffers, things get more expensive, and citizens tend to be cowed (bored, ignored) into staying away. This effect has as much to do with the laws of organizational and social dynamics as it does with the people involved. That said, I’d be curious to know more about Dummerston’s Act 46 committee and why they told citizens that there would be no debate on the issue. There needs to be debate on the issue or it will be pushed through. Local education officials want it.
Windham Southeast Said ‘Perfectly Placed’ For Unification Under Act 46
We need to decentralize everything
I’m taking this point up from your comment because you’re right, this is very important, especially in government. It’s easy to control people when power is centralized. But it’s even more important than that and I’ll explain…bear with me…
Nature is like a long-running laboratory experiment and the systems and patterns that have come out of nature have been tried and tested for millenia. That means nature is even more solid than science because science has only been around for a fraction of the time. Therefore, science could use taking a look at the patterns of nature and act in harmony with it, that would be the ideal (and I’m sure we would fly as a species if we did that). There is no reason for science not to do this. If we did we’d live a lot healthier. And political systems could use a leaf from the book of nature also.
We have the technology today, to determine the most ideal democracy and it’s quite simple, believe it or not. We can use technology to allow everyone equal voice and vote accordingly. Something like Survey Monkey is already out there to find out, without a doubt, without delegates, without electoral colleges, who people want to vote for. That software can be developed even further to apply to the whole political platform.
But it gets even better than that!
Every person should be able to now – with the technology at our disposal – to put up their own proposals, have the information for and/or against it presented (with youtube videos for example, or audio presentations or written articles) and give it a discussion period for a specified time, afterwhich, people can vote ay or nay on the proposal. Results that yield 75% or more come into effect (because that’s a big chunk of “the people” wanting it)
Voting this way makes much more sense. But the beauty is – each voter has the same weight and it’s all using decentralized power. It is the perfect democracy. By Jove, we won’t even need the little troll politicians anymore! We can vote on each issue ourselves. I guess workers were made redundant, now the politician can also be made redundant!