Waynesboro: ‘Concerned’ folks raise issue with local school funding

A group of concerned parents and teachers in Waynesboro held a press conference on Monday in front of City Hall downtown to highlight their desire to have the city continue to honor a funding agreement for the local school system made 20 years ago.

I’m just finding out about this today; seems that I’m not on the mailing list for the group that put this together.

One of the speakers was the local Democratic Party chair, Ashleigh Jackson, who apparently made a good point about the city putting too much stock in keeping taxes low.

I’ve been making that point for lo these many years, including back when I was the local Democratic Party chair, during the Obama era.

That was forever ago.

We’ve actually been run this way in Waynesboro for the entirety of the 30 years that I’ve been in local media, and what has it gotten us?

Our manufacturing jobs left here a generation ago, we’ve replaced them with jobs folding sweaters and serving hamburgers and chicken tenders to people coming in off the interstate, and we’re way under the state average on what we spend on our schools.

And now the City Council wants to take money away from our schools, because what else would they do?

A succession of City Councils has done absolutely nothing to try to attract good-paying jobs here.

We used to have DuPont and General Electric employing more than 10,000 locals between them in good-paying manufacturing, research and corporate-office jobs, but that was forever ago now.

Back when we had those jobs, we were willing to pay what we needed to for good schools, because those folks wanted their kids to be able to follow in their footsteps.

As those jobs left for Mexico and China in the 1980s and 1990s, we panicked, and elected reactionaries who we let convince us that that only thing we could do now was cut our property taxes to the bone, because we were never going to be what we had been, the economic engine of the region, dating back 50 years.

The old saying, you get what you paid for, has been borne out since.

The folks who didn’t want me at their press conference on Monday are being too easy on our local leaders over this funding formula thing.

There are elections this fall for two of the five seats on the City Council – in Ward C, the seat held by Mayor Kenny Lee, and Ward D, the seat held by the former vice mayor, Jim Wood, the guy who made Waynesboro famous for his broadcast slur of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

What we need to do is send a message to our do-nothing City Council this fall at the ballot box – that we’re tired of you folks standing in the way of progress, and if you won’t join us in Moving Waynesboro Forward, we’ll replace the lot of you, this year, and in 2028.