So I Went to A School Board Meeting...

As some of you may know, I'm a News Reporter for three local radio stations in my hometown. Tonight, I went to a school board meeting. After suffering through a 3-hour meeting in which exactly nothing newsworthy happened, I was struggling to come up with a story to send the news director to use tomorrow. To overcome my writer's block, I wrote this. This is the story I wish could go on the air:

[language warning: some swearing.] 

Wednesday night’s School Board meeting was interminably long and unequivocally boring. Nothing happened, no one cared, and even the school principals didn’t want to be there. As such, you, as the listener, definitely don’t care what happened, because if you did, you would have showed up and sat through the entire three-hour-long meeting, most of which was spent discussing budget minutiae and teaching the mostly elderly board how Facebook works. But you and I both know that was a waste of time, so I won’t bore you with the details of the reports from athletic coaches about “he’s going far” and “she’s so talented.” I won’t tell you about the brief appearances of the students of the month, or the board’s feigned interest in “how do you do it?!” or their sheepish responses, smattered with “um” and “well…”

Instead I’ll remind you that regardless of what happened last night, today your child still got up for school, maybe ate some breakfast, left the house in an outfit that odds are you seriously questioned before begrudgingly wondering to yourself what happened to the fashions of your time and sending them on their way with a loaded backpack and a fistful of lunchmoney. They still went to math class and the teacher still managed to simultaneously overexplain a concept and not teach a single student a damn thing about how it actually works. And after the last bell rang, they still went to the same sports practices and study groups, and when it was all said and done, they came home to the same house and the same room and the same bed and tomorrow they’ll do it all over again.

I’ll tell you the only detail of that meeting you care about, which is this: tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, your child will still follow this exact same routine, until the day they graduate from high school. As of last night, nothing has changed, and based on previous experience, it never will. Which is why I’m telling you: if you want to know what happened at the school board meeting, go to it yourself. No one else gives a fuck.