Election Day 101: Why You Should Go Vote

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Photo courtesy Flickr/Johann Dreo

Photo courtesy Flickr/Johann Dreo

A whole lot of ugly politics has happened during the last few weeks of this school board election. And if you’re like me, you’re dismayed by the antics of people you respected, worried about whether this signals a new round of hostilities at board meetings, and probably just flat out tired of it.

You may even have decided not to vote now.

I’m not in the business of telling you exactly who to vote for. We’ve provided snapshots of each race and their endorsements, but those in no way should be construed as endorsements of any candidate.

But I’d like to tell you a story – one that if you go to the same church I do, you may have already heard told masterfully from the pulpit. But it’s a true story, and one that has become my guidance when thinking about decisions I have to make regarding Dallas ISD – whether it be who I vote for trustee or recommendations I make as part of the Site Based Decision Making Committee I’m on.

I won’t name the school – mostly because it doesn’t matter, this can play out in any number of schools where the poverty rate climbs past 90 percent. But every day until her last day earlier this semester, this elementary school’s principal sat in the entry way of her school, greeting each tiny face by name. One day, as the clock inched closer to the time the bell would ring to begin school, she sat chatting with a few volunteers when suddenly, the front door flew open, and two hands appeared, shoving a wailing little girl into the building. The door closed quickly, and it was clear that whoever had thrust this child into the building had beat a quick path away from the school.

The child continued to wail in the foyer of the building as the principal got up from her seat and walked up to the girl, kneeling. She hugged her, then held that tiny, tear-streaked face in her hands and quietly asked what was wrong. Through gulps and sniffles, the girl whispered. The principal nodded, rose, and quietly walked the girl to the nurse’s office.

When she came back, the volunteers asked if the little girl was OK. The principal said yes, she just didn’t want to come to school. See, that little girl had been wearing the same uniform for four days straight. She felt dirty. She felt smelly. “She felt undignified,” the principal said, so she took that little girl to the nurse, who had a washing machine and dryer available for just this need.

“She felt undignified.”

That has stuck with me for months now. But how does this story have any bearing on why you should vote, or how – other than this is the sort of thing our schools address as part of the business of teaching our children?

The answer is simple. Every child that sets foot on a Dallas ISD campus deserves to feel dignified. They should feel dignified, regardless of what kind of family they have at home, regardless of how much money their parents are or aren’t able to donate to their school, despite the fact that they may be wearing uniform pants two sizes too big because that’s what was available from the donated uniforms.

They deserve to feel dignified when they stumble over words because they’re a grade level behind in reading because nobody ever read to them at home – they may not have even had one book in their home. They deserve to feel dignified if special needs make it hard sometimes to deal with the noise and bustle of a classroom and they have an outburst. They deserve to feel dignified if they don’t speak English fluently yet. They even deserve to feel dignified when the weight of the day becomes too much and self-control eludes them and they face discipline.

If that little girl had been allowed to remain feeling undignified, would she have heard anything being taught that day, or would she sit, feeling low and unkempt in her seat as her class functioned around her, not with her or even because of her? How do you tell a child she can be anything she wants to be with a good education if she can’t even feel clean, happy and prepared to learn?

And when you put it in those simple terms, you can begin the business of looking at school board candidates through that lens. Do they feel all children deserve to feel dignified, too? Do they understand what that means? Do you believe that a school board should consist of adults who feel this way? Because the adults who do, get it. They get the odds some of our brightest students face. They get what it takes to help them even those odds. And they get that at the end of the day, this gig is about every single child in Dallas ISD.

So if you live in districts 2, 4, 5 or 7, please do go vote. Less than 10 percent of registered voters take the time to vote in school board elections. Don’t be among the 90 percent who forget what it feels like to be small, vulnerable and undignified.

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Bethany Erickson lives in a 1961 Fox and Jacobs home with her husband, a second-grader, and Conrad Bain the dog. If she won the lottery, she'd by an E. Faye Jones home.
She's taken home a few awards for her writing, including a Gold award for Best Series at the 2018 National Association of Real Estate Editors journalism awards, a 2018 Hugh Aynesworth Award for Editorial Opinion from the Dallas Press Club, and a 2019 award from NAREE for a piece linking Medicaid expansion with housing insecurity.
She is a member of the Online News Association, the Education Writers Association, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, and the Society of Professional Journalists.
She doesn't like lima beans or the word moist.

4 Comments

  1. Rob Shearer on April 29, 2016 at 10:18 am

    Thank you for writing about the real issues that we need to be discussing when it comes to DISD.

  2. Larchwooder on April 29, 2016 at 10:25 am

    Wow. I don’t live in DISD but that is powerful stuff. Very articulate. I think all school districts can learn a lesson from that story.

  3. Candy Evans on April 29, 2016 at 10:51 am

    What a beautiful story! And a reminder that our schools are so much more social service centers than academic institutions, hence the challenges DISD faces. While stories like this initially make me want to beat some parents and decree “permitting before parenting”, principals like this who dignify every little angel who crosses their thresholds are the real heros and stars in our society. Thank you, Bethany! Anyone want to donate a washer and dryer to DISD?

    • Bethany Erickson on April 29, 2016 at 10:27 pm

      If anyone did, I definitely can point them toward some schools to ask.
      And I’ll be honest – it’s hard to do everything you can for your child when you’re working two or three jobs that make less than $10 an hour, and you have rent, utilities, food, etc. to buy, too. And so many families in some pockets of the city don’t own cars, so laundry has to be dragged to the closest laundromat, and if you are working two or three jobs, it might be hard to find the time to do that. And you might not have the money to feed the machines, either.
      It’s hard, I think, to conceptualize how extreme the poverty is. I think most of the parents I meet in my volunteer work want to do everything they can for their kids – but resources are lacking.
      Sometimes CitySquare does these simulations where you learn how hard it is to be poor – and how expensive. It’s eye-opening, and something I wish everyone would try at least once.

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