Press editorial: Trustees should be trustworthy

With friends like Carol Goodman, Post Falls School District sure doesn’t need enemies.

At least nobody can accuse her of harboring a secret agenda.

Goodman, who was elected to the Post Falls School Board in 2013, went beyond the normal call of duty by traveling to the state capitol earlier this session as part of the annual school boards association gathering. Good for her. But what she revealed during the Kootenai County legislators’ town hall last Saturday in Post Falls was startling.

Goodman said she supports a bill that would take money away from public schools, a bill which “lets the family’s tax dollars follow the child. In other words, that child would get whatever was allocated per student within the state and if you were going to send your child to a parochial school or a private school, that money could go toward tuition.”

That’s not an original idea by a long shot. Critics of public education have long clamored for their tax dollars to go away from public schools and to church-sponsored or other private schools. There’s a problem with that, however: It’s patently unconstitutional. Remember the part of the Idaho Constitution that requires the Legislature to “establish and maintain a general, uniform and thorough system of public, free common schools?” Apparently, Goodman doesn’t and, sadly, she’s not alone. Otherwise these insidious attempts to defund public education would long since have stopped.

What’s most disturbing is that Goodman isn’t merely a member of the general public expressing an opinion. She’s a trustee; she was elected to be an advocate for her community’s school district, not undermine it by trying to steer its dollars toward other educational options.

A trustee is “an individual person or member of a board given control or powers of administration of property in trust with a legal obligation to administer it solely for the purposes specified.” Goodman is in violation of that definition, if not the law.

It’s hard to imagine that this is what Post Falls voters wanted when 231 of them cast ballots for Goodman in May 2013, when she beat Julie Hunt by 11 votes.

The next time you vote in a school board election, remember that you’re electing trustees to strengthen public education. We’re grateful for Saturday’s powerful reminder that an informed electorate can make all the difference in the world — or at least in our school districts.