When I was a kid, I rode Bus No. 8 to and from school every day from kindergarten to the end of sixth grade. Dad worked in town, so I just caught a ride until the fall of my eighth grade year, when I began driving. It’s remarkable I’ve not died in a car accident. I’ve provoked countless opportunities to take myself out, and every day when I hit the road, I’m on the lookout for people like me. Traffic laws don’t much pique my interest, unless a school or a work zone is involved. Everywhere else, it is a practical autobahn to me. If I know the road and the traffic tendencies thereof, I feel I should personally have no speed limit. This will eventually play itself out in some of our nation’s finest courtrooms, I’m sure. I’m fully prepared to defend myself in court to whatever the charges might be. I’ll lose, of course. But I feel I’m mentally equipped to suffer that loss.
Back to Bus No. 8… I grew up about six miles from Marion Springs Elementary in rural Baldwin, KS. Each day I would spend at least an hour and at most better than two hours on No. 8. That’s a lot of time. Kids find ways to make the time go by a little quicker. I got to know virtually everyone who rode on that bus for any amount of time pretty well.
Marion Springs, from what I understand, was built in the 1960s as a one-building district house serving a community of about 30 square miles. There was a short auditorium (maybe ten or twenty feet shy of a full-length basketball court? Or maybe it was full length. It’s been a damned long time since I’ve been out there. It’s plenty big for little kids. In the sixties, they graduated high schoolers. I don’t know if they had enough students to field many teams, however…
That community consolidated with the Baldwin School District in the sixties. The building served as an elementary for residents of the Marion Springs district, and in junior high and high school, the children attended Baldwin Schools. There were eight people, more or less, in my class at Marion Springs, and that was kind of the norm for classes of the seventies and eighties. (And 00’s, for that matter…)
The school was remarkable. The elementary served as the district educational center for the mentally handicapped of the community, and at the time it couldn’t be a better place for it. Anyone who was teasing those kids, if I recall, was dealt with quickly and publically. There wasn’t much room to fuck around making fun of kids out there. For starters, there just weren’t very many of us there. We learned to get along. There was a hell of a lot of roughhousing, but real fighting? Just didn’t happen much at all. It ranged in attendance 1-6 about 45-65 students. I’d have to look all that stuff up, and I’m not going to.
Of those eight I’d mentioned above, all graduated high school. Well, maybe one didn’t in Baldwin. I forgot about that chick… I guess I’d forgotten completely about her for the past twenty years or so…that doesn’t matter either. The school has always been at or near the top of district performance academically. Does the high student to teacher ratio help? Of course. Does the smaller overall student population help? Absolutely. But there is no disputing that the school has been one of the primary reasons that USD #348 has remained a very strong one for over half a century.
The #348 voted via school board to cease operations of Marion Springs Elementary and Vinland Elementary this past week. This comes in the wake of a district-endorsed $23 million bond issue that passed in November of 2008. This community of about 7,000 has taken on an absurd amount of debt load during a recessionary period while making itself promises which cannot be kept.
I believe a significant amount of the population here is insane. Or stupid. Or both. I no know-won round hear is donna do git smarter over dis.
I’m tired of the school district promoting an agenda that 1) Diminishes the quality of education of its residents in favor of poorly built facilities; and 2) Is an active participant in community destroying behaviors, including but not limited to: a) A 99%th percentile mill levy in the coming decade statewide; b) Acting as its own Political Action Committee in advance of a public bond issue; c) Inept at best, and incompetent at worst, lack of leadership in the district office.
I could go on all night here. But I won’t. I would think that everyone on the school board would be able to read balance sheets. They can’t. I’ve been informed that the current board that serves the community is unable to process financial information. I know this from my communications with a source who I believe to be an impartial and accurate judge of such qualities of competence.
So we close three elementary schools in one year, open another we can’t begin to afford, and publicize this as an academic direction we can be proud of?
Hogshit.
And I think about some kid today—I don’t know his name, but I know him--on the old No. 8. I hope he likes the taste and smell of limestone particulate in August, because when you spend three hours a day on a 45-mph school bus with the windows down…It’s not going to be quite as much fun to get home to the farm after the six hours of schooling that sandwiches a couple of long rides with buddies that get on after him and debus before him…he gets to dust himself off to slop the pigs…
