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Richard Crowson: We Have Met The Enemy

Surely no one is surprised that parents are very concerned about the proposed boundary changes in Wichita’s school district. Schools are about our children and our children are an emotional subject for all of us. So if you’re going to start messing around with my kid’s school, maybe even closing that school and making my child go elsewhere, then you’ve got some serious explaining to do.

Superintendent John Allison has been doing some serious explaining. Wichita School Board members have been doing some explaining. But, the legislators and the governor who cut state funding to our schools and caused this whole thing are miles away from this discussion. They have, in fact, moved on to weightier issues like the state dog and whatever’s in the urinary tract of state welfare recipients. When they’re not dabbling in urology they fancy themselves gynecologists who make reproductive decisions for Kansas women.

But also responsible for these school boundary changes is us. Us voters. We are the ones who elected the legislators and the governor. We are the ones who keep falling over and over for the lines about how taxes are too high and how woefully over-funded our state government is.

Until we start connecting the dots all the way from our children’s school to the pandering politicians who dangle tax cuts before our eyes and who want to destroy public education, and all the way from them to ourselves and the choices we make in the voting booth, until we see that connection, our frustration with school cuts will continue.

We have met the enemy and he is not the school superintendent or the school board or even the governor or the legislature; he is us, the voters.

Richard Crowson is not only a editorial commentator for KMUW. He's also a cartoonist, an artist and a banjo player.