Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 88. Sunrise is 6:24 AM and sunset 7:21 PM for 12h 57m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 63.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1905, the Russo-Japanese War ends with the Treaty of Portsmouth, mediated by President Theodore Roosevelt (Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts).
Whitewater has a school district and a city government, each governed through boards of seven elected residents, and each bound by law and their own policies. To govern well, these elected representatives need something else to guide them: an understanding of their primary obligations.
For the school district, the primary obligation is obviously internal: students (responsible to their parents) and those who teach them. Others (residents who are non-students and non-parents) matter, but only secondarily. How are children learning, feeling, and experiencing their scholastic environment? It simply cannot be the case that non-students and non-parents matter as much as children, parents, and faculty within the district. To give everyone equal time and attention would mean insufficient attention to those who are the key subjects of the district.
This perspective is so important and should be so obvious that those who do not grasp it require, themselves, a remedial education.
For the district: those inside the district’s walls matter most. The district’s most important responsibilities are thousands of minor children within its care.
For local government: those outside the walls of city hall matter most. The city’s most important responsibility is the thousands of residents outside the municipal building. A small number of city employees should not be the primary concern of Whitewater’s elected representatives. That’s all trivial as against providing fundamental services for residents. Whitewater is not a prosperous city, and as America flourishes the gap between nation and city only widens.
It’s a myopic perspective that leads councilmembers to focus on the internal when there are important external problems that longtime politicians have failed to address, have excused, or for which they have shiftlessly blamed others.
See Local Government Should Begin and End with the Fundamentals, Whitewater Needs Neither a King Nor a Mind Reader, Scenes from a Council Meeting (Responsibility), and Scenes from a Council Meeting (Representations).
Whitewater can do much better.
NASA Trying to Bring Back the Supersonic Commercial Aircraft:
so does this mean that taxpayers should take a backseat to parents in teh school district? (i agree about the city. sick of all the in house crap with them)
Good afternoon — no, it does not mean that taxpayers should take a backseat. It means that when taxpayers or any residents speak about the district, I’d recommend that they primarily address how students are faring. That’s it. That’s all it means. A roof, plumbing, whatever: it’s all secondary.
Anyone has a right to speak about the district, and they should say what they want.
The most important topics, however, those most worth discussing, will be about students’ learning and experiences. Fair enough to argue that taxpayers aren’t getting their money’s worth, but money’s worth for what exactly? And here we are: money’s worth for children’s education. If there’s no connection to learning, to children’s experiences, it’s not an educational discussion. It may be a plumbing discussion, a roofing discussion, or a lawn-maintenance discussion, but it’s not an educational discussion.
Members of a school board should be devoting their time to educational discussions. Those are within-the-building-walls discussions, but they are about far more than the mere construction or color of the walls, so to speak.
How are the people inside (children and teachers) doing? That’s my point. That should be the heart of every discussion.
Do you approve of this or that administrator or teacher or employee? Approve (or disapprove) should rest on how well children are doing in their studies and in their experiences.
By contrast, how a few adult workers inside city hall are doing should not be this city council’s primary concern. How residents outside city hall are doing should be their primary concern.
That’s the distinction.
ok thanks that makes sense