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Harrison Board Saw the Train and Refused to Move · Commentary - TJ Meadows

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Imagine knowing a train is only a few miles away.
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  Speaker 1: You cannot yet see it, but the people who monitor
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  Speaker 1: the tracks tell you it's coming, and it's coming fast.
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  Speaker 1: Then amazingly, you step from safety onto the rail. You
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: have deliberately moved yourself from safety into harm's way. Onlookers.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: They tell you to move to reverse course to get
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  Speaker 1: off the tracks, but you refuse. Then the train appears,
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: and the question is no longer in doubt. It's visible,
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: bearing down by the second. At the last moment, someone
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: grabs you and pulls you from the train's path, and
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  Speaker 1: instead of being grateful, you fight them, screaming, kicking, struggling
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  Speaker 1: to get loose. They hold you down until the train passes.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: Then once the danger is gone, they let you up.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: Calm and unscathed. You walk away as though nothing happened.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: That is not unlike the behavior of the Harrison County
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  Speaker 1: Board of Education. The school system had two hundred and
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  Speaker 1: thirty nine positions above the state funding formula, while its
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: exs Levy could only cover about one hundred and fifty
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: of those. They were warned the train was coming. Rather
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  Speaker 1: than live within its means, the system drew down roughly
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  Speaker 1: sixteen million in reserves, essentially using the savings account to
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  Speaker 1: fund ongoing employment without a real plan to replace those dollars.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: That's not budgeting. That's a self prescribed poison pill, leaving
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  Speaker 1: the system vulnerable to financial failure. Wednesday, the State Board
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: of Education pulled Harrison County's board from the tracks. Odds
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: are the local board still in place despite this dereliction.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: We'll get up after the train passes and act like
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  Speaker 1: nothing happened. The real shock is this. The problem was
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: likely not a failure to recognize danger. It was a
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  Speaker 1: refusal to act on it. Not irrational, but calculating a
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: situation where fiscal responsibility collided with local politics, and politics
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  Speaker 1: won kicking and screaming, documented in actions defiant of sound
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  Speaker 1: financial judgment. Better to let the state board take action
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: than make the hard decisions locally, said another way, they
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: knew the state would pull them off the tracks. Given
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: the facts outlined during Wednesday's State Board meeting, that's the
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: only conclusion that makes much sense. The voters of Harrison
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: County should remember this in action, this failure, the next
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: time these board members appear on the ballot.