There was mor
e than a little bit of consternation last Monday night about the absence of anyone from the public at a special school board hearing on spending priorities for funding from the Gun Lake Casino.
Some on social media have declared school officials guilty of deliberately avoiding public input on the matter, but the real problem lies in the modern “Bowling Alone” difficulty in getting the word out and even in organizing a three-person parade.
As Finance Director Bill Melching pointed out, the Wayland Union Board of Education duly published a notice on the school district’s web site for quite some time ahead of the special meeting. Whether or not a notice was published on the door of the administration building is moot, because that old-fashioned way of communicating to the public is ineffective.
So that leaves the media.
In bygone days, public notices of meetings and of meeting minutes routinely were printed in newspapers of general circulation. Because the rules of this game have changed over the years, this process no longer applies. School districts, under lots of budget pressures, have cut costs by eliminating publishing public notices.
Furthermore, the gradual decline and near fall of local weekly newspapers has come at a cost in getting the word out about what’s happening or what’s coming. Don’t expect the media always to provide information in the public interest for free. It’s a business, and money does a lot more than talk, especially when that business has fallen on hard times.
As I have ruefully pointed out in this space before, we have stood by helplessly and sometimes cluelessly while watching the quality of life of small communities decline in that process identified by sociologist Robert Putnam as “Bowling Alone.”
Too many of us barely know our neighbors. Too many of us no longer belong to community organizations such as Rotary, Kiwanis, the Lions, dedicated to making our home towns better because of their collective efforts.
Too many of us have retreated into the weekday lifestyle of working where we don’t live, coming home to eat dinner, watch TV and then go to bed. On weekends we spend most of our free time watching sporting events, going to the mall or working in the yard.
The culprits in this process, which has grown since the 1960s, are women entering the work force, television, the Internet, cheap oil causing bedroom communities and the technology revolution.
So most of us seem to be only a collection of individuals going about our lives separate from others, except for family and closest friends. Just about the only way we connect with anyone any more is through mediums such as Facebook.
So what’s this got to do with zero attendance at a public forum of schools’ casino spending? Everything. Our loss of sense of community has metastasized to communicating important information to one another.
For those who still care, there will be another public hearing on casino spending priorities at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 21, at the administration building, 805 W. Superior St.
