This commentary is by Nancy Tips, of Windham. She is the grandmother of a school-aged student who lives in Windham but does not attend the Windham Elementary School.
Everybody loves a legend. Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, The Headless Horseman, Johnny Appleseed, Davy Crockett. American history is littered with legends. And in Windham we’re so special, we have our own one. It’s The Legend of the Windham Elementary School.
Legends are a charming encapsulation of our imagined past. In Vermont as a whole, and in Windham in particular, we can’t resist making legends of our forebears; we can’t stop ourselves from swooning over their simple lives and strong community, in which school and church are imagined to have been cornerstones.
You are likely familiar with the outlines of such a legend: the weathered and rosy couple pause in their honest labor on their prosperous little farm to wave cheerfully as their pigtailed and freckled offspring merrily traipse to school o’er the sun-kissed fields, their childish hearts quickening to the sound of the school bell ringing its joyful welcome, their infant smiles met with those of their weathered and rosy neighbors.
Such a scene is lovely to think about for some, I suppose, but no reason to keep on flogging the importance of today’s moribund, asbestos-laden, nostalgia-wrapped Windham Elementary School to a bunch of harried, two-earner families who are just trying to meet all their obligations without going nuts.
These obligations include: ensuring that their kids are healthy, safe and getting a good education; commuting in all kinds of weather to distant jobs; managing complex logistics for retrieving their kids and getting them to after-school programs; remaining optimistic. All this while cooking delicious family meals, not falling asleep at the wheel and not screaming real loud where anybody can hear them. This might not be as sweet a picture as the nostalgic fantasy, but it has the merit of being a more accurate depiction of the lives of many of today’s Windham parents.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of us in Windham think that trying to make life easier for today’s young families is more important than cherishing the Windham school legend. There’s even been a bit of an uprising among the parents of elementary school kids in our community: Around a third of kids eligible to go to the Windham Elementary School go elsewhere instead, at great expense to their non-wealthy parents (see above). These parents pay the tuition because they believe their kids and their families are better off with the kids in school outside of Windham. Their reasons are diverse and clear: they want more opportunity for their kids; they want after-school programs they can count on; they want a school closer to where they work. These parents have petitioned the school board and even the Vermont court system for tuition relief, allowing them to choose to send their kids to schools that would help them meet their many parental obligations.
Many, probably even most, Windham taxpayers would prefer that their tax dollars be used in a way that would actually help Windham parents, as opposed to tormenting them. So what’s stopping us from closing the Windham school and allowing school choice?
Some think that our problem is Vermont’s out-of-touch view of school choice. “School choice” means something quite specific in a sparsely-populated state. Here, the ability to decide what school your child attends might most often involve questions of convenience and proximity to workplaces, as opposed to the suspect motives that might impel some parents in more populous settings to demand that public dollars pay for school environments that don’t reflect modern reality.
Some think that the problem is the intractable faction in Windham who continue to cultivate The Legend of the Windham Elementary School at the expense of Windham’s real-life families. As peaceable community members, we are often staggered by the fury that a handful of our neighbors evince on behalf of our pitiful school. (Best to avoid reading inflamed social-media outbursts on this topic if you value your peace of mind.) A willingness to confront this fury with calm reasoning is sometimes beyond the most self-confident of us, especially if we are tired from commuting, cooking, not screaming, etc. One more obligation, to attend school board meetings that grow more numerous and nasty with the passage of time, is sometimes just too much.
Of course, we hope for a brighter day, whose outlines are barely visible to us, but whose arrival is inevitable. The brighter day will be the result of yet another wearying town referendum on the school. Currently the school can no longer function due to loss of staff. Students are being tuitioned to a nearby school while efforts are made to restaff and open the Windham school next fall, an outcome dreaded by many parents. All this suggests that many voters will finally be fed up and will express their willingness to let the young families of Windham decide what’s best for themselves. The alternative is to continue the divisive and senseless promotion of an ideal that has no connection to the realities of modern life.
