If you have a child in Richmond’s schools and haven’t moved to one of the counties in utter disgust yet, or started pricing private schools, then you must not have read the Richmond Times-Dispatch today.
[No, not the story about the cheap Jamestown tourist merchandise crap featured on the front page(!), but the story about the future of our schools buried in the Metro section. The one that starts out like this:]
The Richmond School Board will ask the Virginia Supreme Court to reverse a judge’s decision that backed Mayor L. Douglas Wilder’s control over when the board receives funding.
“We feel that the law is fairly clear in the responsibilities of school boards,” School Board Chairman George P. Braxton II said in explaining the board’s decision.
The board voted 7-2 Monday to appeal the case, which was decided in April by Richmond Circuit Court Judge Melvin R. Hughes Jr.
Former mayoral adviser Paul Goldman, who has been watching the ongoing legal wranglings behind the school board’s frantic struggle against being independently audited, had this to say about this latest STOOOPID decision by that distinguished and “entitled” body:
They continue to waste time, money, energy and public tolerance by now deciding to spend another month or more arguing in court what good leaders would resolve in a much faster, more efficient, and more responsible fashion. The School Board says it has no choice because Judge Hughes’ lower court decision sets a precedent. WRONG! There is a reason School Board Chairman Braxton, a lawyer, and the counsel to the Board on this case, are working pro bono: no attorney in Virginia could risk a bar complaint for making a client pay for such bad legal advice.
Keith West of the 7th district, one of two members not to vote to jump off a cliff and take our kids with them (the other was the tireless Carol Wolf), said it best:
“Ultimately, it does no good. . . . The fact is that the constitution of Virginia forces us to rely on them for our money, and we should accept that.”
Honestly, if the seven school board members who voted to prolong this nightmare were kids, they’d be put on restriction and barred from watching “Dora the Explorer” for a month. At the very least.
But how scary — these are the same people making key decisions about the education of our children. (And if you think you know the Richmond Public School System and reflexively blame Doug Wilder for all of this, please take Save Richmond’s handy “EZ 2 Love Those Schools” quiz and get yer lessons).