The Budget Meeting

When I was a newspaper reporter, I covered school board meetings for years. Many of these were budget meetings, which were a special treat. Most residents didn’t come to these meetings; they just paid their taxes through their mortgages. (I don’t go to these meetings as a homeowner today. Unless there’s something outrageous going on, I’m not going to debate a line item on a school budget. Just take my taxes and use it to educate the kids.) However, there was a certain group of budget hawks who would attend. These people were well-meaning and would keep the school board honest.

Then there were the people at the budget meetings who were just jerks. They would just complain about their taxes, and most of them had money, which you could tell from the addresses they gave—it was never the poorer people. Anyway, at one budget meeting, this one woman stood up and started complaining. That wasn’t unusual but what was odd was that she started complaining about me. She didn’t address me but she started going on about how she never knew there was a budget meeting and nobody told her.

People on the board kind of looked at me sympathetically like, “Is she crazy?” One guy on the board told her, “Well, the paper does always list the school board meetings before they happen.” It was true: We listed these meetings on page 2 under the section helpfully labeled “MEETINGS,” so it’s not like we buried them on page 17F. When it was a budget meeting, we would often put the notice on the front page, knowing that people would be more likely to go. In the days before widespread internet, I don’t know what else we were supposed to do to advertise a budget meeting other than advertise it on the front page of a newspaper. Well, she didn’t read the paper, which I guess was everyone else’s fault for not forcing her to subscribe. She had just found out that the school board existed and she was all fired up that nobody at our paper sent her an engraved invitation to a meeting.

She ended by saying something snarky, then looked right at me and stomped out.

I was livid. It wasn’t just because this woman just touched down from Saturn and discovered the governing structure of her kids’ public school, but because she was making me late. This school board meeting went for hours and I was late for a dinner out somewhere and since it was before cell phones, I couldn’t let anybody know. She was one of the people keeping me there.

I really regret not following her outside and telling her off. I would have told her, “Lady, we only write the newspaper. We can’t make you read it and educating yourself is ultimately something you have to do. Your ignorance is not my fault. You are complaining about your taxes while I make $9 an hour trying to inform the public. I live in a tiny apartment at an address that’s not nearly as impressive as yours, and at this rate, I’ll never afford to buy a home and complain about my taxes. So if you’re going to bitch about paying $5 extra a month on your mortgage for kids’ education, don’t address your complaints to the guy who can barely afford a haircut.”

I forget how much later it was, but obviously I did quit the job, and I didn’t miss people like her or meetings like that.