Please do not park your cars along the west side of Park Street until town officials resolve an issue involving safety concerns for the children. We appreciate your cooperation.
What’s the big deal here? The message really doesn’t seem all that inflammatory or unreasonable. It certainly wouldn’t consume an inordinate amount of taxpayer-funded paper in these trying economic times. I doubt if it would provoke a lawsuit by the ACLU. It might even prompt speculation as to whether a person who disputed the directive -- placing their personal convenience over the well-being of children -- should really be in the teaching profession in the first place.
Would you tend to foam at the mouth if you received it at work?
Of course not, and it is a safe assumption that staff members at the Bennington Elementary School would have complied without rising up in fury. To think that they would do otherwise is a little insulting to the teachers, whose voices seemed to be conspicuously absent what with all the big wind emanating from other quarters.
It was interesting to watch the administrative histrionics that were generated by a letter from Town Manager Stuart Hurd asking the BSD board to control where teachers park their cars until an ongoing problem on Park Street is resolved by the Select Board. It seemed like a relatively harmless request, but you would think that Mr. Hurd had demanded
that the school board give up a dozen employees to participate in shadowy medical experiments the way they carried on about it.
The town manager’s request in effect set the stage for another one of those juvenile, finger-pointing melodramas that have become such an integral part of life in Bennington. The crux of the school board’s complaint -- at least as it was directed toward Mr. Hurd -- didn’t seem to have as much to do with what was an appropriate course of action for the kids’ sake as much as the fact that he had the effrontery to ask them to do it.
So, instead of issuing a simple memo to teachers to remain in effect until the Select Board makes its decision regarding Park Street, and possibly contacting Lodie Colvin as to when that decision might be expected, it was allowed to deteriorate into another Big Issue.
The charge that the Select Board was "burying its head in the sand" was a little unfair when the sum total of the BSD’s contribution to the effort -- inherently a serious safety matter -- consisted of a verbal request to town officials toward the end of the last school year to look into it. All the disingenuous huffing and puffing on its behalf rang especially hollow when an article in the Banner the next day pointed out the fact that no one from the school board even showed up at an earlier Select Board meeting, during which the problem was slated for discussion.
You have to wonder what factor changed so much in the time that ensued between the Select Board meeting that was not attended at all by school representatives and the huffy denunciation of that same board by the school system’s business manager after Mr. Hurd’s letter offended the touchy sensibilities of the BSD. It was only at that point that the prospect of a child being hit by a car suddenly took on an urgency.
What the exchange really boiled down to was the fact that no one on either board seemed to be placing any particular priority on a potentially dangerous situation until Mr. Hurd’s letter focused attention upon it. But the BSD’s adverse reaction to the town manager’s perfectly appropriate request was bewildering at best and transparently self-serving at worst.
The people in Bennington should be very grateful to Mr. Hurd for sending the request. Wounded vanity is vastly preferable to other scenarios that might finally have prompted some serious action. The official melee to shift the blame onto someone else if a child had been hurt or killed would be exactly the same.
I would also take this opportunity to state that I was very disappointed when Lora Block opted not to run for another term on the BSD board, something I found difficult to comfortably insert into earlier columns. That is certainly not meant to suggest that I didn’t completely understand her decision.
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