To the editor:

I write as both a former resident of East Lawrence and a committed conservative in support of Rich Minder’s comments as published in your June 2 edition. The school board’s recent push for school consolidation demonstrates that the board is suffering from an infection of the command and control model of governance which is so inimical to the health of our communities.

That this program of centralization should skate through under the guise of “fiscal conservatism” is particularly galling. Earlier comments by Board President Scott Morgan indicating his preference for freeing money that is “tied up” in neighborhood school buildings to be spent on additional programming at a central location are, though perhaps well intentioned, balanced on a mass of misunderstandings about what it takes to cultivate healthy children, healthy homes and healthy communities.

Morgan’s belief that kids will be better off in “state-of-the-art” facilities and programs far from home as opposed to the “mediocre” school down the street typifies the arrogant assumptions of the central social planner, a creature who has seeped into our government on nearly all levels.

Moreover, it is indeed striking that the same board that ends neighborhood-based schooling in lower-income neighborhoods is also able to appropriate for a school on the wealthier west side the name of native East Lawrence poet Langston Hughes as a symbol of education into a “progressive,” “enlightened,” and “tolerant” world view. It is not at all inappropriate for Minder to point this inconsistency out.

Caleb Stegall,

Perry