Living Witness(134)
“So that’s why you and the other members of the old school board lost the last election? Because people from the development didn’t vote?”
“Exactly,” Henry said. “Oh, some of them did, of course. Judy Cornish did. She was a wonderful woman, Mr. Demarkian. She really was. But a lot of them up there just weren’t thinking. And they didn’t know Franklin Hale or Alice McGuffie either. They didn’t realize what they were going to be stuck with if they didn’t get out and vote.”
Demarkian appeared to be only half-listening. Henry went back to fiddling with the folders on his desk.
“If you’re looking around and see one of those that says Books to Print, I wish you’d tell me about it,” Henry said. “It’s the file I’m looking for. I can’t find it anywhere. I used to think Christine was good at filing things, but I guess she wasn’t. The damned thing isn’t here anywhere.”
“I thought,” Gregor Demarkian said, “that the reason the old school board was rejected and the new one was elected was essentially a practical issue. People tell me that the problem was your own and your board’s lack of attention to necessary details. The teachers’ contract issues, for instance. And the new school complex.”
“Bullshit,” Henry said. “The new school complex? There wouldn’t be one if it weren’t for me. You don’t know what this place is like. They resent every dime they have to spend on education. Every dime. They’d let the schools go without paper and pencils. We’ve already had to start charging our kids to play sports. The buildings are falling down. They’re antiquated and inadequate. It took me six years to get that project approved, and then it was only halfhearted approval. Franklin Hale would end it altogether if he could.”
“But the building on the project has gone on for a while, hasn’t it?” Gregor said. “It’s been something like five years?”
“Because I could never keep the town on track to keep the funding up,” Henry said. “We do our school budgets by referendum, you know. Every year, we have to go to the town and beg for money, and most of the time we can’t get a budget approved for months. Hell, there have been years we haven’t been able to pay our teachers, or anybody else, until practically Thanksgiving because we haven’t been able to get a budget through. As soon as there were cost overruns on the project, we were in trouble, because we had to go back to the town and ask for more. And the town never wants to give more. Never. If it wasn’t for the state and state law, they’d throw out the teachers’ contracts, set a salary scale that looked like it was written for waitresses at the Snow Hill Diner, and refuse to hire anybody who wouldn’t work for that. We’d end up with teachers who’d flunked out of ed school, or worse. We’d end up without any teachers at all.”
“I thought teachers’ contracts were another of those things the town thought your board wasn’t handling very well,” Gregor Demarkian said.
“They only thought we weren’t handling it well because they didn’t want to pay the going rate for teachers,” Henry said. “Most of these people have no respect for what teachers do. Their idea of education is a lot of rote recitation of what they think of as Timeless Truths: God Loves You, the United States of America Is Never Wrong, Don’t Have Sex Until Marriage. Not that many of them listened to their own advice when they were in high school. Marcey Hale almost didn’t make it to her own high school graduation, she was that close to showing. It doesn’t matter. They don’t think they have to make sense. They don’t have the decency to be ashamed of their hypocrisy. They weren’t ever going to like any of the teachers’ contracts as long as the contracts had defined benefit pension plans, and that’s not going to change unless the union s go bust. Which they won’t.”
“All right,” Gregor Demarkian said.
“It makes me nuts when I hear people say that they voted for Franklin Hale because of practical considerations,” Henry said. “It’s a lie. It’s a bald-faced, unvarnished lie. There isn’t anybody in this town who doesn’t know who and what Franklin is, except for some of the people from the development, and they’d never vote for him anyway because he doesn’t want to spend money on schools. But as for the people of Snow Hill, the regulars, the ones who have been here forever—if they voted for Franklin Hale, it’s because they wanted what he had to offer, and what he has to offer is religion in the Snow Hill Public Schools.”