Kyle City Limits
by BRENDA STEWART
To be honest, I get a snoot full of candidate forums and fundraisers and rallies and politicking, in general. I read it and hear it, in one form or another, pretty much all day every day. So, on my way to listen to yet another candidate expound upon why they are great and why the other guy is a pig, I was not all that happy about the infringement on my Saturday morning. I just felt that I needed to get the information, first hand. I was starving, a bit cranky and I had my 14-year-old with me, so they had better be quick about it.
Rebecca Bell-Metereau walked in looking like a cross between a librarian and a CEO, pulled a chair up comfortably to the conference table at which a couple dozen of us sat, and casually talked about how her Board of Education District 5 candidacy had evolved over the past couple of months. Last summer she was concerned about raising the SBOE’s profile at a time when the general public did not even seem to know the difference between the Board of Education and local independent school districts. Back then, she worried about getting the SBOE on people’s radar. Little did she know that the storm siren was just about to wail.
With a bit of help from the current Board of Educations’ publicity-lassoing shenanigans last spring, folks seemed to snap to attention and say, “What the hell?” Everybody I talked to wanted to know who these kooks were and how they got into office. Ironically, I couldn’t blame this one on Perry. Well, not entirely. He did appoint chief clown, Don McLeroy, board chairman and then rested on his laurels as the religious right shepherded the spiraling descent of our curriculum into the arch conservative abyss. And although the Senate grew a spine and rebuffed Perry’s efforts to reappoint him, they let Gail Lowe replace him? Boy, that’s a lateral move if I’ve ever seen one. Just don’t try to clap around her, she’s not one for spontaneous expression of admiration, especially from our pesky public school youth.
Embarrassingly, we ushered all these folks into office. They weren’t appointed. Either by omission, ignorance or indifference we elected this group of individuals who made it their mission to carve away the very core of the respect and deference we hold for scholars, historians, scientists and classroom teachers. Once we awakened from our stupor, we booted out several of the board’s fanatical right-wingers last spring and we’ll have one more chance for ballast in the election coming up this November. So, off your haunches, friends. This vote will have more impact than most votes you have ever cast.
And that was Bell-Metereau’s contention. Throughout her address, she kept her voice even, her point mercifully concise and her tone convincingly positive as she implored us to simply get the word out, across party lines, that Texas’ future holds huge promise – for our children’s education, our economy and our reputation with the rest of the nation. At one point, she locked eyes with my daughter, a freshman this fall, and intently stated that she was confident that we would once again get politics out of the classroom and truth and accuracy back into our textbooks. She was not only connecting with her audience, she seemed to recognize the soul of the issue.
And on that promise, we walked out the door, with Emma laughing about this forum being not quite as painfully tedious as some of the political stuff I’ve dragged her to in the past. I was actually feeling cautiously optimistic and a tad suspicious that sanity might just be sneaking up on Texas, and I laughed too, as we headed on downtown to lunch.
