I Attended a School Board Meeting. I Will Not Be Attending Another School Board Meeting. — Anonymous, Verified Member

Submitted anonymously. Identity is known to the Reverend and to no one else.

I attended the meeting because I had a concern. The concern was procedural. I prepared. I read the agenda, posted online forty-eight hours before the meeting as required. I wrote down my questions. They were good questions — the kind that assume the process works the way the process says it works, which I now understand is a form of innocence.

The meeting began twenty-two minutes late with no explanation. The chair used a gavel once, at the beginning, and then never again, which means the gavel was ceremonial, which means the authority it represented was also ceremonial. This is the kind of thing you notice when you have been reading the Cult of America materials.

Public comment was three minutes per person. I used the three-minute version of my prepared remarks. The board members looked at me with the polite attentiveness of people who have decided before you begin that the period after you finish will be the same as the period before you started. The vote was unanimous — unanimous in a way that suggested the unanimity had been decided somewhere other than the room, at a time other than the meeting.

I drove home. I found the Reverend’s dispatch about the form that no longer existed. I read it twice. I felt understood in a way I did not feel at the school board meeting. I will participate in local governance through other means. I have not yet identified what those means are. I am working on it. — Anonymous (Verified Member, Code on File)