This past Monday I attended the annual school budget and warrant meeting here in Keene, NH. (My first) In this meeting the various articles up for vote, including the budget, were available for discussion, debate and possible amendment by the attendees. Most of the evening was spent on Article 1: the proposed 2013/14 budget and most of the proposed amendments were focused on increasing the new year’s budget, but there were a few dissidents within the crowd who voiced some opposition. I, myself, proposed a 10% reduction in next year’s school budget. After all, the private sector has been forced to make radical changes in these lean years. Why not government as well?
My proposal was soundly defeated but I walked away with some valuable insight on how the machine functions . With another dozen liberty loving individuals in attendance, we probably could have proposed an amendment to reduce the budget to equal last year’s spending. With 40 or more, we could have reduced the budget by 2-5%. With 80, we could have reduced the budget by 10% (or 6.3 million dollars.) If you have any doubts, look to the current success story in Grafton, NH.
Please note that every motion to increase the budget was also defeated. If it were not for the small handful of free staters in attendance, the budget would have most likely increased by another $170,000.
An excellently produced video report by Dave Ridley. He addresses the need for students to be prepared to document the increasingly closed environment of the government school system.
When you lose with a camera rolling, you win. If the video survives to become public, some of the abuse you suffered is proven. If the authorities snatch the camera and the video doesn’t survive, they show themselves to be thieves…That camera might not save the student. It might get her into more trouble initially, but it should give her some ethical high ground she wouldn’t have had had she kept the camera in her pocket. Whipping out that camera forces the authorities to choose between censorship and openness. Whichever one they choose, you win, as long as the public is well informed of what happened.
This past Saturday, I called in to WKBK’s Talkback to discuss the bloated 2013 school budget with School Board Chair, Chris Coates. As of now, they have only two options on the table for us to vote on in March. Both involve increases in the tax rate. As usual, there is no 3rd option. Are you surprised?
Both Chris and Board Financier, Ann Szot, have said on many occasions that we should call our representatives in order to get this problem resolved. Typical pass the blame. Apparently the board made some poor spending decisions that have come back to bite them (like an unnecessary 40 million dollar elementary school with half of the funding coming from the state) And now the State is reneging on its funding.
The Keene Sentinel reported on Tuesday’s School Board’s public hearing on the proposed budget for 2013-2014. Steve Gilbert reports that twenty-six people spoke, twenty-four of them — mostly teachers and parents — argued against proposed staff cuts of $1.45 million in next year’s budget.
“Only one speaker challenged the size of the proposed $62.3 million budget. Darryl Perry, a member of the Free State Project who moved to Keene nine months ago… (more…)
On this first day of the New Year, I was motivated to do something I don’t normally, and that is contacting federal ‘representatives’. A website linked on my Facebook feed made it as easy as customizing a form letter to address three congressman and the president. The letter called for the immediate closing of the US Department of Defense’s School of the Americas, also known as WHINSEC, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. WHINSEC is a training facility in Fort Benning, Georgia where primarily Latin American militants loyal to US foreign policy demands are instructed in tactics of controlling and killing. You don’t often (or ever) hear the four politicians who received my message discussing the collateral damage and crimes attributed to graduates of the school, which made it the most fitting way to frame a new year, while talking heads babble on about fiscal cliffs. For more on legislative and other actions to take against the School of the Americas, check out soawatch.org.
A Keene-area state representative laments the fact that, “there is, legally, nothing we can do to prevent them from moving here to take over the state, which is their openly stated goal.” The Other; “them” in this instance refers to participants in the Free State Project, the political migration of liberty minded people to NH. Though the FSP has no central direction and amounts to little more than a promise to move together with like-minded others, freshly elected representative Cynthia Chase has classified her new neighbors as a threat. But not just any threat. “Free Staters are the single biggest threat the state is facing today,” she opens with on a blog featured at the Blue Hampshire website. Continuing,
In this country you can move anywhere you choose and they have that same right. What we can do is to make the environment here so unwelcoming that some will choose not to come, and some may actually leave. One way is to pass measures that will restrict the ‘freedoms’ that they think they will find here.
One wonders how Ms. Chase plans to make the state “so unwelcoming” for libertarians in such a way that would not be unwelcoming to others. She tips her hand by opening in regret that political purges are illegal, but then suggests that she and her ilk can try.
