Local school boards play critical role

The title "Dumping traditional school boards could save education" caught my eye in the My View piece (March 9).

As a local school board member, I was interested in what a college student, Jeffrey R. Wilbur, had to say. Being the eyes and ears of the community is one of the defining roles of school boards. However, I was greatly disturbed with the underlying unsubstantiated assertion upon which his revolutionary change was apparently based: "The average salary of members of county school boards is well into six figures. And for what? What benefit are they to the system?" The benefits of dumping of traditional school board "... are direct and obvious: Millions of dollars in board members' salaries would be freed to go directly back into the schools themselves ... most importantly, the bureaucracy itself would cease to exist."

Mr. Wilbur's whole premise is based on an enormous flaw: that school board members are raking in huge amounts of cash and are themselves an ineffective bureaucracy.

I would like to rebut this and propose that genius of local school boards is the genius of democracy itself: locally elected citizens who are responsive to the community, no larger than a county, that implement educational policies and over see its administration in order to meet the needs of citizens in the community.

Mr. Wilbur's first fallacy is about salaries. Until recently, by law, school board members in Utah could not be paid more than $3,000 a year. This salary amounts to little more than volunteer work, with some defrayal of expenses, a far cry from the alleged six-figure salary. Utah law now allows districts to compensate boards more, but when a local district, Jordan, attempted this recently, it was quickly reversed with public outcry. I would say the vast majority of board members still make the basic $3,000 a year. Thus, eliminating local school boards would save so very little in salaries but would reap an enormous loss of the critical local control of education.

However, an underlying problem in education is that the state and federal governments have usurped so much local control from school boards. This, my friend, is where the real bureaucracy is. A second problem is that so many people have relinquished their democratic obligation to be involved in local education issues and governance.