'What's Best For The Children'

Is It 'What's Best For The Children'?

Or Is It Rather 'What's Best For The 

School Board'?

Opinion
Attend any contentious Emery School Board meeting and you'll likely hear from a board member they're  doing what's "best for the children."  This Pavlovian response can be heard virtually whenever a dissenting citizen has the audacity to express an alternative viewpoint to the solid unyielding policy wall usually presented by the Board.  The idea is that the Board is always working in the children's best interest, you understand.
Citizen followers of the Emery School District might find this sentiment fatuous, given the sorrowful history of District policy as chronicled by the Tattler and other media but contained within it is a more insidious, yet revealing meme.  This didactic claim; they're only doing whats' best for the children, is outwardly meant to show their virtuous dedication to their job but what it really does is subtlety remind everyone that what parent and citizen dissenters want then is expressly not what's best for the children.  The Board has a lock on what's best for the children; outliers are just that, outliers.
In a school district not as top-down as Emery, this parsing of would be innocuous language might seem overwrought but here it just serves to clarify: this School Board is in charge and challengers among the rabble will not be listened to.

One might think the School Board, having recently been the target of so much agitated citizen and teacher trepidation would be sensitive to the haughty and dismissive nature of this kind of 'we know what's best for the children' talk, but no.  Not here.  Here, they can't seem to help themselves, the culture of quashing dissent being so intrinsically ingrained.

To anyone so bold as to venture to a School Board meeting armed with a good intention and a good idea that might be a change from the staus quo, realize, it's the School Board that has the best ideas for what's good for the children.  Your idea is just disruptive.  But hey, "Thanks for coming!" as they never fail to say.