Tonight’s emergency school board meeting has only one item on the agenda and that is Monty, the small blonde middle schooler who was turned into a goat. This is the third time something like this has happened this school year and the town is getting sick of making the evening news.
Tonight at 8pm, after we’ve all had dinner and stared at our phones for an hour or so, we’ll pile into the gymnasium like meetings before. We’ll fill each of the creaky bleachers and rusty fold out chairs. There will be extra room in back to stand and lean and fidget for the parents who can’t find a seat, of which there will be many, since three towns of parents are represented by this board.
We’ve had what feels like a hundred school board meetings the past few years. There was one about the teacher strike and the one where someone passed out at the microphone. There was one about when the vending machine at Franklin High almost flattened that sophomore, and one of our favorites where Frances Boudreaux got kicked out for yelling that The Great Gatsby is too gay to teach to kids. Tonight, though will be more civil than those, and the mood more subdued. There will still be two microphones, one per aisle, each facing the raised platform where seven of eight school board members will sit. It’s these seven faces that are tasked with forming a system of rules and guidelines for our school district, and it’s during these meetings where they sit and look out at us, and us back at them, waiting for a system that works for us. The eighth member of the board, Priscilla Doucet, will be absent unless her “long covid” has subsided. Priscilla’s chair will be the only empty seat tonight at 8:05pm when the meeting is gaveled to a start, all in the name of Monty the goat.
Another board member will start with the facts as reported by the local paper; that’s what they’ve done in the past, is why we say that. The local paper reports the facts using the school’s documents, which are public record and filed in triplicate at the registrar’s office. The article, which we’ve all sent around by now, states the small, blonde Montgomery Dupont pulled an unnamed classmate’s hair. The article quoting the report states he then refused to stop when instructed, and pulled a second unnamed classmate’s hair during the same recess period, escalating the charge from Tier B2: aberrant misadventure, to Tier B1: felonious behavior. The article includes a diagram of the soccer field with icons denoting the approximate location of the events.
It continues on to say that when Monty was removed from the field and admonished, he called the administrator a “turd” (and inexplicably includes “(sic)”) which escalates the charge from Tier B1 to Tier A3: malicious comportment. Per section 9a of parish code, an A3 level action forfeits any parental notification requirements by the administration. The tiers and associated penalty chart are included in the article as a link, but we don’t click the link anymore when these articles go around. Should one of us accidentally click the link, several articles would pop up, each detailing the history of the intricate and convoluted system the school board, with our help, has contrived. We already know in the end that the administrator had limited options and felt she needed to employ the Farmyard Animal Protocol.
Now you’ll forgive us if we can’t muster the empathy or warmth you may feel the circumstances merit, but our patience is wearing thin. Our disdain for this system is matched only by the community we feel in the rusted creaky rows of the gymnasium. That isn’t to say we aren’t mad. At each meeting we tell the faces of the seven of eight that our community wants change. We deserve better and we demand it into the microphones one at a time. The faces of the board look back on ours and mirror our outrage but also our boredom. They have the teachers’ union to please, the governor, the three mayors to the three towns in this parish, and each constituent of each town. They’d be happy to enact a new rule or discard an obsolete one, should we coalesce behind a solution, but until then they’re just here to listen.
They’ll listen to Mrs. Landry from Poplar Street who believes incremental change is the answer. Doug Perkins over on Elm believes in a radical rethinking of administrative duties. Cynthia thinks that more guardrails and more regulations can stem the flow of punitive measures and the deviant behavior which they attempt to suppress. Ezra feels that the current maze of oversight and policies kneecaps any chance at functional governance. Someone, we’ll miss the name because we’re looking at our phones, thinks the administrator in question should be put on leave, and then a woman in a green blouse that doesn’t fit her right will say that the same administrator deserves a promotion. The school board will cut each of these speakers off after their allotted two minutes.
We need to leave soon to get to the gym in time to get seats together, but before we go, we want to be honest with you. Monty should’ve been turned into a goat years ago. It was the first thing we texted each other after the article went around. He’s been a menace his whole eleven-year life and the administrator (who we all agree shouldn’t have had the power to turn anyone into a goat in the first place) did do the town a favor. But remember we aren’t going to this meeting for Monty specifically, just like we aren’t going for the coffee or the patriotism. We’re in the gym on the bleachers that hurt our backs because to not would be to miss out on trying, or at least listening to our neighbors try. It’s exciting to yell about something, even The Great Gatsby—which is actually pretty gay when we think about it—Frances is right. Ultimately tonight’s meeting will go how the other ones went and whenever the next one happens it’ll go how tonight’s goes. But what were we going to do tonight anyway? The school board elections will run again in a few months and maybe we’ll vote Priscilla out this time, if for no other reason than to give someone else a seat with a good view. ■