I treat school districts, educational collaboratives and other school, or even adult services, Medicaid, others like any other public sector entity. But a decade ago (or even today) it wasn’t working like any other public sector.

How I view constituent services:

• The role of an e-911 operator at a public safety answering point or PSAP is to take my emergency call, wether its fire, police or EMS types
• The PSAP from the state government tells my local fire, police or EMS types respond (hopefully!) within 6 minutes or less
• If my family’s wheels get damaged by a pothole, I can’t call 3-1-1 but I would have to dig through the phone book and find the number to the local DPW and hope they would honor the request to fill the pothole since “tracking numbers” is too much of an expense of a computer system for the Granite State
• if I came into an ER with a blunt force trauma or a gunshot wound, they would stop the pain or bleeding ASAP
• if I had a disagreement with a town official, I call up the executive and resolve the problems like grown ups.

Schools, are totally different. Teachers have zero accountability these days, and paraprofessionals (or just paras) are held to higher standards while the central or corner office suites (c-suites) will just sit around and do nothing. They have no moral responsibility to try to take down flames and mitigate deaths.

Maybe that’s why one school board member of my former town that shares the same name of a famous 49ers player said years back “we don’t have teachers fight flames, and we don’t let firefighters teach”

I think I answered my own question. But it shouldn’t have to be. It’s the horrible truth called reality.

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