Hering: I do not understand people

Update: Link to the editorial added. Someone should have told me earlier I forgot to include it.

Hering on the recall of three LCSD board members:

If the recall committee gets enough signatures and makes the ballot, the resulting election should clear the air, either ratifying what Alexander has been trying to accomplish, or backing up the school district administration in going in a different direction altogether.

And if the backers fail to get enough signatures to force an election, that should clear the air as well.

No. Hering is right about one thing: Many, many people will use the outcome as evidence to support their point of view (though just who those people are will depend on the outcome).

However, if Hering is implying that a recall is a decisive event that will settle anything, he's mistaken.

Very few people are simply going to give up and walk away just because they don't like the outcome. Some will; others may. Some will change tactics, or revise their beliefs. But the community and its members are too invested in the Lebanon Community School District to just walk away based on one event, even if it is momentous.

Hering, of course, is not content just to predict that this event will somehow resolve the tension in the district; he's outright calling for it to do so:

In any case, when the current recall attempt is over, one or the other side in the long series of Lebanon school district disputes will have lost and should then retreat from the field, giving Lebanon schools room to reorganize in peace.

If this dispute did not have at its core differences of opinion regarding the future of education - in other words, if it was really only about personalities - then this might stand a chance of happening. As is, what Hering is missing is that there is still a very real, if implied, debate going on regarding the best way to educate people in the LCSD. That debate isn't going to disappear after the recall, no matter how it turns out.

Side note: I've often wondered if Hering just sounds completely ignorant when he sounds off on any given topic, or if he's actually ignorant. This editorial provides me additional clues, as it's about something I have been paying a lot of attention to. I think Hering doesn't really understand the situation all that well. He should let someone else write the editorials about the LCSD - Jennifer Moody, perhaps (though of course she would not be able to sign them).