Today's election lesson: Students, school referendum don't always mix at polls
By Will Higgins
The Indianapolis Star -- May. 3, 2011
An election worker at a Franklin Township school got an idea this morning, and it seemed like a good one.
At first.
Tom Petty, a poll inspector at Precinct 22 in the gymnasium of Kitley Intermediate School on the Southeastside, figured he'd give students a glimpse of democracy-in-action by bringing them into the gym to watch some actual voting.
Petty bounced the plan off the principal and some social studies teachers. Pretty soon down the hallway trooped students from Grades 5 and 6 for their real-time civics lesson. "I was trying to bring alive the act of voting," said a chastened Petty, in the aftermath.
As it turned out, the political temperature in Franklin Township was too hot on Tuesday for a teaching moment. Voters were deciding whether to raise property taxes by $13 million annually for seven straight years to fund the public schools there.
If they decided against it, 81 teachers would be laid off and three schools closed (for Election Day, Kitley's teachers were told to wear something other than their "Vote Yes!" T-shirts).
So there was Chris Shilkett on Tuesday morning, about to hand in his "no" vote.
To do so, he had to wade through several dozen very cute children.
And there was Petty the professor, saying something like: "See boys and girls, what this man is doing today will affect you kids tomorrow."
Shilkett, who lives on 11 acres and whose taxes would go up $1,250 a year if the referendum passed, was thinking: "Oh my God! This is not a vote I want to cast."
He and his wife, Amy, assumed Petty was deliberately using the kids to pressure voters to vote "yes," and, further, that he may have been doing the bidding of school administrators.
They were hopping mad.
Jeff Eaton, the school principal, assured them the whole thing was Petty's idea, and that it wasn't cagey politics at all but social studies.
Chris phoned the Marion County clerk's office, which oversees elections, and complained. He was told, however, that these sorts of hands-on tutorials are common and they're OK. ("We wouldn't consider this to be a violation," said Angie Nussmeyer, a spokesperson for Clerk Beth White.)
The Shilketts pressed on. Amy told Petty to stop at once. "It looked like they were prostituting my daughter!" she said.
The Shilketts' daughter, Faith, 12, is a student at Kitley. She loves the school, and thrives there. The parents also love the school. They give credit to its staff for Faith's recent greatly improved scholastic performance.
But the idea of Faith, or her classmates, being used as props for interests that opposed her family's was galling.
"The school is first-class," said Amy Shilkett, "but we also need to be able to afford our property."
Petty, who lives in Lawrence and insisted he "didn't have a dog in this hunt," stopped his civics lessons abruptly, apologetically. He claimed he'd made "a mistake, an honest mistake."
Later, Principal Eaton was asked if the entire episode -- the civics lesson, the perceived politicking, the proposed $13 million tax hike, the possible school closures, citizens' outrage -- might itself make a good civics lesson for the classroom.
"At this point," Eaton said, "I just want to get this election over."
