The Bus Route That Cost Less Than Their Mileage
The superintendent, Dr. Pierce, lived in Springfield. He drove 46 miles each way to work, and the district paid him a vehicle allowance of $500 a month, written into his contract. That was $6,000 a year.
The board went on a retreat every fall. Two nights at a lodge near Branson, rooms and meals and a facilitator, for seven board members and the superintendent. $5,310.
The board went to the state school boards conference at the Lake of the Ozarks every October. Lodging, registration, and mileage. $3,742.
And then there was the board mileage. The district had a policy that paid each board member 70 cents a mile for driving to board meetings and committee meetings. Most of the board lived out on farms. Added up across all seven members, it came to $2,848.
Eli put it in a column. He put a total at the bottom. He highlighted the cell.
$17,900.
“That’s a bus and a half, Mom,” he said. His voice was very quiet.
“Gene Faulkner sold me my first combine,” Mark said finally. “On a handshake. Let me pay it off over three harvests.”
“I’m going to go up there Monday and say all of this.”
“No,” I said.
He looked at me.
“You went once,” I said. “You said it with your heart, and they thanked you for it. People behind a long table are good at feelings. They are very bad at a page of numbers with their own names on it.” I put my hand on the folder. “This time I don’t want them to look at us. I want them to look at the page.”
He thought about it. Then he nodded, slow, the way he does when he has decided I am right and is annoyed about it.
“One rule,” I said. “No adjectives. No insults. We don’t call anybody anything. Names, miles and dollars, that’s all. If I can’t say it in front of Pastor Reyes, it doesn’t go on the sheet.”
Eli typed a title across the top of the page, and then he turned the laptop around.
What it costs to get to the table.
The hard part was the other three families.
I knew Jenna Isaacson from the grocery and the church, but we were not close. Her husband drove for a propane company and was gone as much as Mark. She worked in the school kitchen, so she could still get to the building, but Holly could not. I found her at the laundromat in Cedar Fork on Tuesday evening, folding towels.
I told her what I had. I showed her the sheet.
She read it standing up, with a towel still in her hand. When she got to the bottom she sat down on the plastic bench like her legs had been taken from her.
“Holly cried last night. She asked me if she did something wrong.”
I did not say anything. There was nothing in the world to say.
“What do you need?” Jenna asked.
“I’m not asking you to speak. I’m asking you to sit. Next board meeting, second Monday. I want every family that this touches to be sitting in that gym. Not shouting. Just sitting there where they can see you.”
“I’ll ask Holly first,” Jenna said. She wiped her face with the towel. “It’s her morning too. If she says no, then it’s no, and I’ll sit there by myself.”