Budgets, News Cycles, and Our Relationships

Last year, for the Martin Luther King Day holiday, I wanted to be involved in some kind of community event around social justice. 

I joined a small local march to our school. Inside the theater, we heard from community members, including the superintendent of my school district. She spoke about their struggles with inadequate parent engagement, and I got to meet her and speak to her directly to learn more about the issue.

A week later,  intrigued by my meeting with the superintendent and looking for ways to be more involved locally, I went to a school board meeting. It turned out to be a major meeting—budget cuts were being voted on. When I learned that night that most of the cuts were connected to poor student attendance, the feedback loop clicked: the low attendance affecting the budget and the low parent engagement spoken about by the superintendent are both signs of a deeper problem. We had a community-building problem, and it had big consequences!

That realization inspired me to get involved in a new way—both as a teacher and a parent—bringing people together across the district.  I started a community group, slowly building a team of volunteer parents and teachers, and reaching out to a few thousand people in the community over the next couple months. They charged up the  school board meetings and increased the volume of parent feedback sent to the inbox of the superintendent!

That random choice about how to participate on MLK day led to a year of public involvement. It became a central  challenge in my life, emerging my personal and professional lives profoundly.

The experience has changed me. I jumped in enthusiastically, thinking these were problems we could solve together. But I was stepping into a system in which people even on the same side of an issue might tell very different stories about what was going on. It was a living laboratory for polarization; it was fun and enriching, but  painful too. School communities are vulnerable places where our most treasured hopes and dreams are invested. Financial instability of a school district affects lots of folks.

I'm left with a sense of discomfort, where before I was youthful in my expectation that if we could just come to a shared set of facts, we would be able to find a common narrative. This would bring people in our community together. But facts about the budget, or who really said what, or what the history of previous discussions has been didn't have the effect I thought it would.

I'm seeing that people don't all have the same needs. It sounds obvious when I write it down, but I don't think I understood before how many different ways there are to explore truth.

I'm seeing my situations differently, with so many layers to them that the stories people tell about what's going on varies unexpectedly based upon small differences in context between us.

It is still important to me to find truth within small confines, with the truth of what is really driving up costs in schools across California, because what I see is different from what I'm hearing in the news and from the common narratives in our community.

But even if I capture all the data I need to show the behavior patterns and spending patterns that I think are incentivized by the fiscal sector, I don't demand that others have the same feeling about it that I do, or agree with me on what should be done.

The truth that I can count on is understanding another person's experience for what it is, without making it wrong, or sharing my own experience more transparently.

I invite you, along with me, to keep valuing and seeking real data behind the conclusions your mind draws. It's not just about budgets or news cycles, it's also about how our relationships feel to us.

I'm seeking more and more to build feedback loops into my relationships, so we can consciously guide what data we gather and the stories we tell from it.