Bracewell: Even a need for public school?

OPINION • 2:57 p.m. May 26, 2025

Editor's note: This opinion piece appears in the May 28 edition of the Moore County Observer.

ROBERT BRACEWELL
District 2 Council Member

I’ll be brief with the regular agenda items to save the bulk of this article for the main points of this meeting.

• We surplused equipment from the Fire, EMS, and Solid Waste Departments that had already been replaced.

• The Sheriff's Department reported that our jail inspection failed due to the condition of the kitchen, which was caused by a leak several months ago.

Having personally visited the jail after the Sheriff reported this to the council, I can attest that this part of the facility is in serious disrepair. They have been innovative in applying low-cost solutions to get by.

• We also approved the purchase of two new mowers for the Sheriff’s Department, as the two currently in use were reported to be “on their last legs.”

Now, to the crux of the business discussed at this council meeting. I’d like to preface this article by acknowledging and congratulating the originator of the clever political tactic of maintaining all other departments’ spending at current levels while proposing a tax increase solely for the school system. Bravo – well played.

After all, who in our society, especially someone holding political office, would dare utter a word against or withhold funding from the purveyors of religion, morality, and knowledge? (See Article 3 of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 for context.)

To do so would be to risk the ire of these priestesses. Given that I ran for office to help my county, then, to borrow a famous movie quote, “I’m your huckleberry.”

I had no intention of addressing the public school system or its inherent issues when I ran, given the sheer scale of this cultural idol. I thought myself wholly unfit to tackle that task at this time. If I could convince even a portion of the county – which is majority Christian – that the government should pursue righteousness and justice as defined by the only One who has the authority to do so, and that property taxes are extortion, my foray into political office would have already surpassed my expectations.

That aside, we come to the first reading of what was eventually passed: an 18-cent property tax increase, reduced from the originally proposed 22 cents, designated for the school system.

This equates to a 27.6% increase in county funding for the school system and a total 9% overall increase in school funding, resulting in an overall property tax increase of 11.5%.

It was then suggested during the meeting that the additional 4-cent “cut” to the school system be added to debt service later – effectively paying interest on this back-door tax increase.

This is the third time I’ve voted on budget proceedings in the Metro Council, and honestly, I went in thinking there wasn’t a snowball’s chance of stopping the inevitable tax increase. I know this debate centered around the school system, but the purpose was to cement bloat in other departments. I’ll circle back to the schools shortly, but first, I want to mention a couple of departments that seemingly every citizen I’ve spoken with is aware of, but few are willing to mention aloud: the Sheriff’s Department and EMS/EMA.

I have previously presented facts – seemingly to deaf ears – regarding the number of deputies we employ. Statistically, we should have 17 certified officers to maintain comparable per capita policing to surrounding sheriff and police departments, based on crime statistics, if you’re curious.

In 2023, according to TBI crime stats, the Moore County Sheriff’s Department charged individuals with 113 crimes. Assuming each incident was a separate arrest – which is generous, since charges are often stacked – this amounts to roughly one arrest every three days.

I’ve heard one council member privately state regarding a previous budget, “I know there are things we can cut, but I learned a long time ago: if you raise people’s taxes, they’ll be mad at you for a little while, but if you cut someone’s budget, you’ve made an enemy for life.”

This mindset explains why we employ three investigators in a department of our size. I’ve had little time to dig into EMS/EMA, but I’ll provide my findings on that, as well as more on the Sheriff’s Department, next month.

Regarding the schools, I must qualify the following: I personally interact very little with anyone involved in the school system, and I don’t even know of rumors of anyone employed by the school system who does not perform their duties to the best of their ability each day.

I hadn’t planned on including etymology in this article, but the word radical comes from the Latin radix, meaning root or foundation. This leads to a question that will no doubt be considered radical in the modern sense – where any adherence to absolute truth is viewed negatively unless it aligns with the institutional narrative.

At a time when all our major institutions (food, pharma, health, policing, justice, politics) have discredited themselves nationally, perhaps it’s time to ask a radical question: Should we even have a public school in this county?

What if I told you that the mocking chuckle or recoil you just experienced after reading that question was a conditioned response – ingrained in you by the Prussian model of education brought to the U.S. by Horace Mann? This model was heavily influenced by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who, speaking of the pupil, said: “If you want to influence him at all, you must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will.”

These peas in a pod were both advocates of universal compulsory education – for the benefit of the student, of course.
The school staff we have are subject to the system in which they work.

My grandmother and my mother-in-law were both schoolteachers, and both advocated – to varying degrees – against putting children in public schools before their passing. The state and federal mandates placed on them are burdensome and not at all conducive to producing well-rounded individuals.

It is said that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. We send our children to government-run education centers for approximately 15,000 hours, K–12, and the only mastery achieved is often reliance on the government. We send them to the state for their education and are surprised when they become statists.

At a time when these other institutions have revealed themselves to be operating against our best interests, we must ask: What was the common thread that conditioned us to permit it? The answer: education.

We’ve been conditioned to venerate certain vocations. Vocation comes from the Latin vocare, meaning “to call.” A vocation was a calling by God for one’s life. Everyone is gifted with different skills, abilities, and roles. I submit that the vocations we most venerate today are principally unwitting tools of the government – teachers, police, and military at the top of the list, fire and EMS to a lesser degree.

I contend that the only thing venerable about any profession is whether the person doing it does their best to the glory of God. The notion that we must bow to a select few professions is, I believe, a product of the programming embedded in our education model.

The narrative of the poor, underpaid, overworked public school teacher – at least in this county – is a lie. Teachers are required to work 190 days per year, while the average full-time employee works 250. That’s a difference of 31.6%.

Entry-level pay mandated by the state is $47,000. This equates to an annualized starting salary of $61,852 when extrapolated to 250 working days. In 2023, the median individual income in the county was $36,705, and the average household income was $66,687.

The average teacher salary here is just over $59,000, which annualizes to more than $77,000 in equivalent pay.

I point this out not to incite a leftist-style class war, but rather to ask: when average government employees are making more than twice the income of the citizens paying their salaries, who is working for whom?

Returning to the earlier mention of religion, morality, and knowledge: The definition of religion at the time the Northwest Ordinance was written was “virtue, as founded upon reverence of God and expectation of future rewards and punishments.”

Morality was “the doctrine of the duties of life; ethics.” The most succinct definition of knowledge I’ve heard is “justified true belief.”

Education is the collection of acquired personal experiences that provide the individual with an outlook which, if properly developed, allows them to view creation and reality rightly, act accordingly, and flourish within society. This view results in a rightly ordered understanding of self and neighbor.

We’ve accepted the fallacious notion that education can be neutral. We’ve subjected our children to secular humanist principles, which teach them they may believe whatever they want personally, but that the correct answer is always “not God.”

Their gospel: you are the result of a cosmic accident, your life has no inherent meaning or purpose, you must assign your own meaning, and you can be whatever you want by following your heart. Then we wonder why we have successive generations of people who are entitled, depressed, and confused.

There is no neutrality in education or in anything else. As Jesus said in Matthew 12:30: “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.” As I stated in previous writings, this is the foundational lens through which all things must be viewed – especially by Christians – since Christ has all authority. Sermon over.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention the school board’s role in this. They are the ones you’ve entrusted with setting policy and budget. They submitted this budget to the budget committee.

I encourage everyone to contact both the school board and your council members. Maintain civility and apply the principle of Hanlon’s Razor when sharing your thoughts on this budget.

In closing, the first most viable option that I would present for this budget would be not to increase school spending by one cent. Then, to reduce school funding by eliminating the school buses, which cost the county about $600,000 annually.

We could coordinate with the largest employer in town and see if they would be amenable to altering shifts to accommodate, or bid it out for private contract, and the ones riding the bus could pay for it – or families could begin ride-share programs.

I will post more information and stats in the Moore County, TN District 2 Facebook Group.

Robert Bracewell is a District 2 council member. Email him at moorecotnd2@gmail.com or call 931-434-0384.