There is no doubt -- none -- that finally politicians heard the public roar. There will be no $50,000 in Rock Hill taxpayer money -- during a time when people are so broke -- spent on a coat-hanger sculpture in front of the water plant. There will be no consolidation of schools in Chester County.
The simple and only reason is that you complained. You, the people who pay the taxes and send your kids to those schools, raised a stink.
And I, a taxpayer, a parent with three kids, applaud every single one of you.
But that doesn't make what happened right.
It sure doesn't explain why that outrage over decisions politicians make doesn't happen more often.
Clearly, in Rock Hill, the sculpture had to go. The city pleads poverty all the time, a full fifth to a quarter of the city lives under the poverty line, and unemployment is soaring to record numbers. But the City Council approves $50,000 for public art. Anybody with a pulse knew the public would be outraged. Kevin Sutton, a councilman so cheap with the taxpayers' money, right there in the public eye when the council approved this fiasco, said it was crazy.
By Friday morning, the complaints were everywhere, and city leaders knew that people would be coming to City Hall with pitchforks, looking for blood. The sculpture was dead before the first taxpayer-funded artist had a chance to bend steel.
That is democracy. It is the real outcry over "pork in the stimulus" that so many have complained about in the federal stimulus package. This was no road, bridge or school. This sculpture paid for by taxpayers, not art patrons, was seen for what it would be years down the road: a rusty gate worthy of derision.
Even politicians figured out the time was right to say no. It took no study, or taxpayer-funded consultants like the city usually hires, to figure it out.
Rock Hill sometimes has a tin ear, though. The city enacted a jaywalking ban downtown when there is no jaywalking. The city did it, partly, so one guy could get a liquor license. The city manager, in his next review just this past week -- in a time when people are so nervous about paying the rent, the light bill and buying groceries -- got a 4 percent raise. Again, Sutton cried foul. The city manager has gotten a raise of more than $43,000 since he arrived a few years ago. From $128,000 to better than $171,000. A 33 percent raise.
Then late Thursday, in front of a public with those pitchforks, the Chester County school board decided, after two weeks of packed public meetings and community outrage, that no way would it be the group of politicians that voted to consolidate Great Falls and Lewisville high schools and middle schools.
Again, democracy in action. People waving signs, speaking up, telling politicians that the public schools belong to the people.
But that's where the art versus schools argument veers into two forks.
School consolidation is not public art. It just might be a worthy idea. Maybe not. Nobody knows for sure, or at least has been able to say so. But there is no way, in just two weeks, that the Chester County school board or anybody else had a chance to look at consolidation and see if it was the best thing for Chester County students. Nobody could say if consolidation would raise test scores, give students in those schools a chance at a better school life and future as an adult.
Great Falls and Lewisville have great traditions. They are separate, distinct places. I sure am willing to listen to anybody who says small schools should be offering the best education anywhere. But did those angry parents tell anyone that those schools are offering the best product and then prove it? Could they show any of us that those smaller schools are all about student achievement and not sports and band, both important, but not nearly as important as the lifetime futures of all kids? Nobody had a chance to study it. No school board member was willing to step back and demand that data be produced on both sides of consolidation. The politicians just caved in.
