The Night They Came For Answers

Issue #18

The Night They Came for Answers

The community meeting was scheduled for seven o’clock.

By six forty-five, every seat in the gymnasium was filled.

By seven, people were standing three deep along the back wall, and the energy in that room was the particular kind of energy that builds when people have been worried for a long time and have finally found a place to put it.

I was the High School Principal. I was the one who had called the meeting.

And I was the one who had helped make the cuts they were there to confront me about.

The district had entered the year facing a $4.2 million shortfall. Not a projection. Not a forecast. A deficit already in motion, inherited from a combination of declining enrollment, rising insurance costs, and a state funding formula that had not kept pace with what it actually cost to run a school in the year we were living in.

The board, superintendent and I had spent four months trying to find a solution that didn’t require us to stand in a gymnasium and ex…