Shared Vision?

If anything came out of last week's often contentious School Board meeting concerning this Tuesday's referendum and proposals to possibly share dollars with the ABC School, it is that the two sides seemed to have found some common ground to talk civilly.

For the past five years that has been in short supply as the charter school has grown and flourished.

As with any tale, however, there are lessons to be taken away by all sides.

But first a query for the School Board:

What in the world is a meeting of such importance doing being held on Memorial Day? With scant public notice to boot?

There might be valid and/or legal reasons to hold a meeting of such gravitas on one of the handful of national holidays most folks can still actually enjoy, but how does any rationale align with the Sunshine Law and the concept of open and transparent government?

The School Board might as well have posted a sign reading, ‘Public, please stay away, we don't need the input.'

This, any Constitutional scholar would certainly contend, skips right past that section about government deriving only those powers as offered by the governed, but that is for the steadily-endangered civics or government class.

And it was not exactly the message to send concerning a referendum that carries no written in stone specifics, just high-minded words and pledges, on how the tax money collected over the next few years will benefit teachers.

Secondly, it is worth sorting through the disingenuous conversation which has shaded this tension between ABC and the other public schools in the county.

That's right, ABC is a public school.

And it is established under Florida law so that it does not operate the same as other public schools.

Like it or not, that is the law and everybody in the county would do better for kids by taking a deep breath, stepping back and accepting that is how the charter law was written.

Charter schools are public schools and mandated - yes, mandated - to operate differently from public schools.

To assert that the ABC school is not a public school is to ignore, for example, that it sends its eighth-graders to the consolidated high school and not across the county line to Port St. Joe.

At the same time, the ABC folks should understand they were set up to operate differently. Different raises suspicions, fosters distrust, by its very nature of being different.

Embrace that difference - it could be argued it goes a long way toward explaining those test scores and school grade - since the distrust and suspicions are others' problems.

But understand they exist nonetheless and one of the reasons is those test scores and school grade.

They are a double-sided coin: a goal for some, a thorn for others.

Among the latter has too often seemed the School District, which, other than the common sense of Teresa Ann Martin last week, has at times acted as if the ABC School was the enemy.

A pledge for any candidate for Superintendent as well as the School Board this fall should be the willingness to work in concert, not at cross purposes, with the charter school.

The question is simple - while the majority of School Board members seemed dead set against the ABC school receiving a dime of anything, where was the superintendent in championing a dialogue for the betterment of students, not protection of turf?

That is the job of the superintendent, to be the day-in, day-out advocate of students. Students seemed to rarely enter the conversation last week.

Finally, there is the case for school choice.

Any mechanism that provides parents more choices on how their child receives an education in the public school system is one to embrace.

Seems that the key is making a commitment to embrace those chances, those opportunities and, regardless of who sets the bar, strive to reach as high as possible with each individual student.

That would seem, even with the expense and turmoil, to have been the driving force - and a logical one - behind consolidation. To improve opportunities.

The ABC School is doing nothing but bolstering that mission.

So whether or not the charter school ever sees a dime from the school board - and the school board should help facilitate housing that school in a more permanent structure through its capital outlay dollars, as board members pledged to "discuss" last week - what seemed to happen last Monday was cathartic.

Maybe it was nowhere on the agenda, but what was put in the open was the simmering tension between ABC and the other public schools, the School Board and teachers' union.

In no small part, getting all that bile on the table was the first step toward moving forward. For ABC leaders to publicly favor the referendum was another step.

All of it may be artifice, little more than platitudes, but it is common ground and allows the conversation to move constructively ahead to the real subject of redress.

Because, after all, it is about the kids, right?