During that called meeting, board members heard from recently laid off faculty and staff who were appealing their terminations.
These layoffs were a result of the district’s budget woes, and reflective of the problems making ends meet that the state government has been having — problems passed down to the school district, the county and our municipalities, exacerbating their own revenue issues.
It was not easy to sit in the lobby with the employees as they waited to hear if their appeals would be granted.
The anger, frustration, fear and sadness was palpable on their faces and could be heard in their voices as they talked about what they would do if their appeals weren’t met.
It wasn’t easy to sit in the board room and watch them as they learned their appeals had been denied.
During tough times, people often call for reductions in staff among their governing bodies to save money and keep their taxes from going up — and this paper has been no exception in years past.
During one Anderson County Council meeting we attended recently, a member of the public called for the elimination of half of Anderson County’s county staff — a notion that we find ridiculous and unsustainable.
Unnecessary positions must be eliminated to save money, but cutting too deeply results in disruption or outright elimination of important services.
And we must remember that employees aren’t merely figures in a ledger or a spreadsheet — they’re people, people who are now facing a job search in an economy that has been slow to recover, in a state that has seen that recovery come to it slower than other states.
It must have been enormously difficult for the five board members to look the employees in the face and deny them their hopes of remaining employed with the district.
But it was an important lesson for them — and for all of us — that we need to keep the unemployed in our thoughts and prayers and not just reduce them to faceless numbers.
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