Community Commentary - Who is responsible for the community "rift"?

This was published in Foster's today.  It is a letter in support of this school board.  We all want to move forward and this post serves to continue that idea while responding to a vocal group in the community.

The aftermath of the most recent ORCSD School Board election, and subsequent rejection of the nominated candidate for ORHS principal, has spawned waves of accusations, intimidation, bullying, personal attacks, betrayals, and psychotic mayhem not seen since the movie "Airplane." Doomsayers now make apocalyptic warnings of the impending collapse of our "Oyster River culture." These dire consequences come simply because a single candidate, with no alternate choice, was presented to the board by the outgoing superintendent, and the candidate didn't pass muster by a 4-3 vote against. He was, however, the favored choice of a vocal semblance of the faculty. Curiously, even though the school staff was originally adamant against an interim principal, a capable interim, from within the district, was nominated by the superintendent and approved unanimously by the board within days after the faculty decided to relent to the option of an interim after all. 

The newly elected School Board is the target of all the attacks. Maybe the CIA should take note. A new form of psychological warfare has emerged from the fertile and creative minds of a core group of self-ordained "noble characters," a passive-aggressive band of partisans coining the acronym FORE (Friends of Oyster River Education), with the altruistic and self-adoring purpose to, "Restore a culture of civility and respect" to the community. These are the same people who are now attending every school board meeting. They have shamelessly ridiculed and disrespected the board, all the while clucking like hens over every decision, every vote, and every discussion point. They have incessantly badgered and browbeaten the sitting school board members like spoiled adolescents. 

Who are these people? Some are hangers-on, similar to those who were in the trailing duck boats during the Stanley Cup parade for the Bruins. The ring leaders are none other than former School Board members. They take offense at the mandate for change from the voters in our district as a result of the election, because they believed the district was blissfully moving along fine as it was. In their view, only after the election this March did a black cloud descend upon the district, making the new board members at fault for what's been, "ripping apart the very fiber of our community." 

Would former board members stage a vigorous campaign of deception and mockery to evade scrutiny of their own performance in past years? The most telling hints to date have been at a May School Board meeting, when a former chairperson stood at the podium during public comments and stated, "We never got sued for not following these policies." Another former member compared the choice of following an RSA, or a board regulation, with the freedom of choice a woman might exercise to decide between having a natural birth or a water birth. His point was, "you should be more worried about the final product, not the process." In other words, from his perspective, following statutory law ranks similar for consideration to the cavalier attitude one might take toward deciding between taking a shower, or a bath, to achieve the final result of being washed. Is this their idea of, "a culture that produces independent thinkers?" Their philosophy is straight out of an era where people from their generation were wearing bell-bottoms and headbands, and smoking weed during the time of Woodstock. Such notions are so arcane, and so far out into the stratosphere, they border on clinical disorder.

The attacks upon the ORSB can best be described as "school-boarding." Despite losing their seats on the board, the former members have taken it upon themselves to dutifully attend all board meetings, and scheduled venues, to carry the banner for the minority. They don't feel encumbered by our democratic process, and will stop at nothing to protect and preserve their own haughty, elitist viewpoints. They seem impervious to the idea that if they are not part of the solution to return ORCSD to an amenable district for all stakeholders, then they are, in fact, part of the problem. Their purpose has been to disrupt the functioning of the current board, and to strive to make the lives of board members as painful and stressful as possible. Such tactics might be something to be considered by our military and the CIA as a new and sophisticated means to an end. After all, we've never been sued for such immorality as this before.

Calvin Jarvis

Durham