A reading of the financial disclosures filed by Hamilton County candidates for the Board of Education brings welcome news.
The disclosures are raising eyebrows because many of the donors are among the more affluent people in our county – donors who don’t even have children in Hamilton County public schools, and donors who do not even live in the school districts represented by the candidates challenging the incumbents in four of nine seats on the August ballot.
There are two ways to look at this surprising oddity.
There’s the conspiracy-theory view espoused by critics who view the outside donations as an extension of what used to be called the “mountain power structure.” Incumbent District 1 school board member Rhonda Thurman (whose financial support came mainly from Soddy-Daisy and Sale Creek, her district) is one of these critics, and she termed the outside supporters “the people who like to control things.” The outside donations to one of Thurman’s challengers tallied twice the amount she has raised.
But there also is the pragmatic view that sees this as the long-awaited and often-sought wholistic community support for education that school board members and local educators have so often told us is missing from our schools and educational system.