No Smoking Allowed on School Grounds (fracking? sure.)

*this first piece appeared in The Canton Repository late last summer; the second piece (after the 2nd jump) is more recent and addresses the local school BOE's decision to, in fact, allow fracking beneath the school.  I passed the story along to The Rachel Maddow Show but haven't gotten a response yet  . . .

(update: the school district is located here in NE Ohio; the Superintendent referenced recently retired)

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So, is this what the new economic austerity model looks like?  Schools forced to strip themselves bare for operating dollars as the governor repeals the estate tax so the rich can pass on all their wealth just like they used to do in the Old Country (how’s that for meritocracy?)

It sure seems like a shortsighted and desperate way to close a budget gap, but I can understand why the leaders at a local school are doing what they’re doing—revenue streams are drying up and we need money to run schools.  But what a perfect symbol of the times.  In case you missed it in the Sunday paper, Marlington will be selling off its lumber and allowing companies to drill for oil and natural gas beneath school property (taking care to assure its citizenry that the drill pad won’t be on school property—just the horizontal fracturing with its millions of gallons of “secret” fracking fluid).  That should calm concerned parents who are up at night worrying whether those chemicals from fracking really can leach into the water supply or not. 

Recently, the House voted to strip power from the Federal EPA, allowing states to be responsible for enforcing certain clean water regulations.  How confident are you that will happen?  We can’t even fund our schools.  Everything keeps getting shifted from the federal level to the state to the local level in some crazy shell game.  At some point, somebody has to pay the piper—we need roads repaired, we need police and firefighters, we need high quality educators. And, we still need to run our public schools.  At what point do we decide to stop this slide toward third-world solutions and stop serving the interests of the few elites and actually do something that benefits the common good?  

Our total tax burden is at its lowest since Eisenhower—when do we step up and pay our share?  Every single person reading this letter has benefited in some way from the collective good of others, whether it was attending a quality public school or having a fire truck nearby to put out a house fire—we have all benefited at one time or another from the support of our community. But you wouldn’t know it from what Marlington is being forced to do.     

Shame on the politicians for allowing this to happen here and shame on those of you who don’t support your schools.  And shame on all of us for allowing this to happen in Ohio. In America. It’s disgraceful.   

Hang on to that firewood, Superintendent Nicodemo, you just may need it to heat the place before all is said and done.

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You’ve got to be kidding—that was my response to the small piece tucked inside Friday’s Rep re Marlington Local Schools and their decision to allow Chesapeake Energy to place horizontal wells beneath school property. Ohio, which Kasich has been running like America’s biggest yard sale, even has instituted a stay on fracking in the Youngstown area while we figure what else besides earthquakes are unintended consequences of hydraulic fracturing. But Marlington says “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” (yes, the drill pads are off school property so as not to be a visual reminder of what lurks below). Going to school will be sorta like going on vacation to Mexico—you don’t drink the water.

And, yes, I read about the money. Big haul. I do wish though I could have been a fly on the wall during closed-door discussions—Do we have any science that demonstrates its safety? Nope, but the Governor and the ODNR, with its staff of 24* well inspectors for the entire state and who are funded primarily by the permit fees by the gas and oil industry they supposedly regulate, insist that it’s safe. Must have been good enough for school officials and the parents of Marlington schoolchildren.

Maybe they were convinced by local officials from other communities who salivate at the prospect of their own little yard sale leading to a boomtown. The problem is that people seem to forget what a boomtown actually is—they swell up real fast and then collapse into ruin once the land has been sucked dry.

I’ll admit that I held out a glimmer of hope for reason and caution as I read one board member dissented, but, alas, it was because she thought they could have gotten more money from Chesapeake. Can someone tell me when did we become a third-world society? 

*this is how many inspectors the ODNR had on staff last year when the fracking debate first broke. At a local panel discussion w/ representatives from each "side," the ODNR rep stated that the goal was to increase the number of inspectors from 24 to 36. Before any of us had heard of fracking, Ohio already had over 66,000 wells in place. Thousands of leases for hydraulic fracturing/drilling (fracking) have been signed since--those are going to be some very busy inspectors . . .