Trivial, indeed

The paper is getting caught up in city politics

Column by Chris Graham
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“(T)rivial inconvenience.” That’s how casually the News Virginian dismisses the concerns raised by parents of elementary-school students in relation to the half-baked redistricting plan being advanced by the Waynesboro School Board.

Trivial – that’s how the paper characterizes the issues you have with having your children changing schools in the middle of elementary school.

An “inconvenience.” Yeah. It will be pretty inconvenient for people with kids a year or two or three apart to take them across town to two elementary schools, to be involved in two school PTOs, to have to support separate school fundraisers.

You want the School Board to take the time to study this sea change in elementary education – and no, six weeks wrapped around Christmas and New Year’s doesn’t cut it in your book.

How dare you!

You’re just as bad as that School Board chairman, Jeremy Taylor, who wants, gulp, more study before we make a move here that some communities have made and then reversed.

Study? Study! We all know what “study” is.

“(U)nappealing and unnecessary.” Basically because Jeremy Taylor suggests it.

The editorial blasting Taylor for wanting to have answers to questions related to a paradigm shift in local education also rides City Councilwoman Nancy Dowdy for holding up the installation of preemptive traffic signals that would make it easier for emergency vehicles to get through crowded city intersections.

The criticism is buttressed with statistics straight from the notebook of Vice Mayor Frank Lucente, who is using the preemptive-signal issue to make good on his personal crusade to usurp the will of the voters of Waynesboro, who voted overwhelmingly in a referendum two years to authorize borrowing by City Council to build a West End fire station.

Lucente is to the West End fire station what George Wallace was to letting African-American students into the University of Alabama. It doesn’t take much to imagine Lucente standing in front of the bulldozer mumbling, “No fire station today! No fire station tomorrow! No fire station forever!”

Dowdy broke with City Council last year on a move to rededicate monies earmarked for the fire station to go toward work on stormwater-system improvements. Which is to say, her chops in the public-safety arena would seem to be above reproach.

So, it makes sense to blast her for misguided “priorities” in public safety – how, again?

It doesn’t, unless you’re Lucente, or Lucente is telling you what to write.

No more than it makes sense to dismiss the litany of concerns being raised by parents to the redistricting as being trivial and point a finger at Jeremy Taylor for daring to take their concerns into consideration unless, well …

Remember, it was Jeremy Taylor who told voters in the 2008 City Council election that Lucente was going to do everything he could to block the West End fire station from ever happening.

This is nothing more than behind-the-scenes politics playing themselves out in public. And the paper is letting itself be cornered into taking sides.

And unfortunately for the paper and for its readers, it’s the wrong side that it’s taking.