We're really conservative except when we're not. The thorny problem of applying principles even when you do not wish to.

In our recent Gubernatorial election, some candidates from the hard right complained that a couple of candidates who were on the right, but not as right as they were, weren't really conservative.

The criticism took various forms. "T. Rex" Rammel, exploring the questionable wisdom of giving himself a nickname taken from a long extinct big lizard of a class which has come to be a shorthand for being way behind your times, claimed that he was the only real conservative and that if not elected the state would go blue, by which he meant red, or pink. . . or liberal or something.  Foster Friess, on the other hand, proclaimed he was a buddy of Trumps and a true conservative, running a campaign that appeared to be for the Governorship of Alabama rather than of Wyoming.

When he did not, to his apparent surprise, secure the nomination the normally jovial Friess groused that the vast hordes of Wyoming Democrats, released from their secret hideaways on Mt. Suribachi (oh wait, that would have been Japanese infantry during World War Two. . . well anyway) came down from the hills and, screaming "Obama!" perverted the process and secured the nomination of Gordon.  There was some talk of "fixing" the election system to keep out the undesirables from the primary system and indeed there's a bill, which is unlikely to prevail, in the legislature with that goal right now.

Anyhow, a cornerstone of recent really right wing thought in the state has been "local control".  Local control of everything.  The more local the better.

Except, apparently, when that local control turns out to be. . . not so conservative or at least not accommodating to a conservative's efforts.

Now, I am in favor of local control of many things.  I'm not arguing against it as a general principle.  But I do feel that, unless you have really good reasons, a principle should be applied even when you don't like the results if its a real principle.  That's what makes it a principle.

That is, you can't support democracy and then complain that the wrong people showed up to vote and should have been kept out.

And you can't be all in favor of local control of schools and then beef when that local control doesn't go your way due to a local board.

And that's what's occurring, and as a result there's a bill in the legislature to dope slap the Teton County Board of Commissioners, although its a bill with general application, not specifically directed at Teton County.  Indeed, it's sponsors no doubt do not see it that way at all.

Teton County is a weird Wyoming county anyway you look at it and it always has been.  One of the last counties of the state to be settled in the state it was originally homesteaded by ranchers who had missed out on everything else as its ranching conditions are horrible.  That made the area a backwater until after World War Two when it was rescued from that status (with the use of the work "rescue" being questionable, by the snowplows of the Wyoming Highway Department.  As late as 1956 author and screen writer Donald Hough could write in jest about his adopted hometown due to its seasonal isolation.

That isolation no longer exists.

It didn't happen overnight but it nearly did. Elements of the old Jackson Hole remained until the 1970s but after that it became a sad playground for the super rich and a tourist destination.  When the super rich show up in small numbers they operate as an advanced party for their own and ultimately the uber rich, which tends to destroy the charm of a place.  That happened in my unadulterated view to Jackson, the seat of Teton County, and the primary town in Jackson's Hole.

As this occurred, the politics in the formerly isolated ranching enclave changed to where it went from being a conservative county to being a quite liberal one, by Wyoming standards.  The Democrats do well in Teton County and in recent years the county has gone from supplying some notable Republican candidates to supplying some notable Democrats.  It still has its conservatives, to be sure, but it isn't like other Wyoming counties.

One of the things that occurred to the county is that at some point it became concerned about its appearance.  And when it did that it put in a set of restrictions on how things could look.

And this takes us back to Friess.

As far back as about 2013 the Friess family founded a school in Wilson.  When they did, it was permitted as a day care.  This drew the ire of some residents who pointed out that schools, which in that case was a preschool, and day cares aren't the same thing.  Since then, Friess has gone on to propose a Jackson Hole Classical Academy.

Now, this may seem like an odd thing for conservative politician and displaced Wisconsinite Friess to be in, but education has been a huge deal on the conservative wheelhouse recently, just as it once was for liberals (and may still be).  Education seems to be a bit of a battleground between the right and the left and perhaps that's not surprising, as the ideas and concepts people pick up in school form them as citizens later on.  That's been well known forever.

Or maybe it is surprising to a degree.  The United States, in spite of complaints to the contrary in recent decades, has traditionally had a very good education system.  I've dealt with this before in our posts about high schools and education, but the US saw, in the 20th Century, a great rise in general public education featuring public schools that went into high schools.  High schools weren't and aren't universities of course, but this was a real advance in education and people who general compare it to the systems of other countries will find that the American system compares very well.  Or at least it did for the most part.

Arguably, at least it did until perhaps the 1970s, and then something did seemingly start to go wrong.  Defining that is difficult and probably not only difficult, but subject to a lot of error.  But putting it in context there was a huge emphasis on education for most of the 20th Century and, during the Cold War, that became all the more serious.

At the same time, it was undeniable that education was also unequal.  Education in the U.S. has always been in the hands of the states and most states delegate that to local boards.  That generally has served the nation very well, but where it broke down was in the parts of the United States that were segregated.  In those areas, economic resources invariably went to the demographics that were in the majority and better off economically, with the contrasting result that schools which were delegated to minorities, and by that we mean usually African Americans, were poorly funded. The education was unequal.  Starting in the 1950s, the United States Supreme Court started to take steps to correct that.

Unfortunately, in some areas that resulted in white flight from districts which left the wealthier population also disinterested in the schools they left behind.  This had a domino effect on some school districts, and taking that story forward to today, it's left urban districts in some, but certainly not all, locations impoverished and poorly supported.  That problem feeds on itself as people with means end up sending their kids to private schools. 

This doesn't happen everywhere, by any means, and for whatever reason, rural districts tend not to have the same phenomenon occur.

At any rate, starting in the late 1970s there came to be a conservative desire to have public funding of private schools on the basis that they were carrying part of the load. This effort, of course, failed to recognize that this was occurring because people were electing to send kids to private schools.  Nonetheless this developed into a "school of choice" movement which, when it was politicized, was mostly politicized on the conservative right.  At the same time a home schooling movement developed which, when politicized (which isn't always the case), also came to be politicized on the right.

In Wyoming this has not, until recently, been politicized, although the number of parents home schooling has grown enormously in the past two decades.  Private schools in Wyoming have tended to be religious schools, which reflects a preexisting movement that dates back to the 19th Century.  Almost any community of any size in the United States will have a Catholic school, for instance, and quite a few will have Protestant grade schools as well, particularly given that American public schools actually basically had been somewhat Protestant schools up until the 1960s but ceased to be at that time.  But Wyoming hasn't seen too much of an effort to create much outside the norm.  This may be changing a bit, or simply evolving a bit.

The Wyoming Liberty Group, the very right wing/libertarian group that some have argued has had an impact on Wyoming's politics over the last decade launched a program called "Parents Unite" this past summer with the goal of boosting school of choice.   At least one district in Wyoming has had school of choice for decades so this will not likely be noted much there, but there is some reason to be concerned by the politicization of this as when it comes from right wing political quarters there tends to be a conception of education that is distinct but doesn't necessarily match what those who look back on really solid educational eras imagine about the past.  There'd be room to argue, therefore, about this development, although its frankly a development that Wyoming was in very early and apparently continues to be.

Be that as it may, the Friess have entered the picture with their Jackson Hole Classical Academy and its conflict with the Teton County Board of Commissioners.  We'll quote from the Jackson Hole Guide on that:

The Jackson Hole Classical Academy will have to live with a 10,000-square-foot gym after elected officials rejected its request for an additional 5,000 feet, which its administrators say is necessary for a fully functioning facility.

Because the zoning for the school’s proposed location in South Park limits maximum size to the smaller area — and because it is not allowed to seek a unique exemption for itself — the academy asked for a broader revision to the rural land development regulations. But the Teton County Board of County Commissioners wasn’t willing to face the risks of undermining policies that commissioners said were carefully crafted to align with county values.

“As commissioners,” Chairman Mark Newcomb said, “we’re really striving to recognize the desire and the need and to support the effort for choice in education … and at the same time struggling with the notion that we really want to protect the open-space values in the county.”

Because I'm impaired in terms of understanding building sizes, I don't really know how big of deal this is.  But it's turning into one.

Which brings us to the school itself, I suppose. What is it?

The JHCA states its mission statement as follows:

Mission Statement

The mission of Jackson Hole Classical Academy is to cultivate within its students the
wisdom and virtue necessary to discover their God-given potential and contribute to
a flourishing and free society.

Our Vision

As a school in the classical liberal arts tradition, the Academy believes that the
pursuit of truth always begins with a sense of wonder. Students can love to learn
what is true, good, and beautiful through a joyful discovery of the world around
them and their own expanding potential.

Academy teachers understand that education is not merely an accumulation of facts
or a memorization of what others have thought. Educating the heart and mind
includes fostering habits of thinking, feeling, judging, choosing, and acting for a
complete and virtuous life. Jackson Hole Classical Academy pursues this vision
within the historic Christian tradition that calls each person to love God and man.

Classical Liberal Arts

The liberal arts curriculum at JH Classical Academy is challenging and content-rich.
Our students study the core disciplines of mathematics, literature, history, science,
and Latin. Students also work through a structured physical education program to
develop the body in concert with the mind and soul. Students experience what is
beautiful by having the opportunity to practice the fine arts and performing arts of
music, drawing, painting, poetry, and drama.

Graduates of Jackson Hole Classical Academy are not merely well-prepared for
further studies but are well along the road to becoming citizens capable of
transmitting to the next generation the ideas and cultural foundations of Western
Civilization.

In short, the school is a Protestant Christian grade and middle school that goes presently up to 8th Grade but is expanding to 9th Grade.  It has an annual tuition of $16,900.00 but offers tuition assistance.

Let's be frank.  Paying tuition for grade school is something that most Wyomingites would more than think twice about but it does occur for those students who go to other private school.  The JHCA is high comparable to at least some and it's not grossly out of whack in its tuition.  

So it's a private school in Teton County with higher than some tuition, but not tuition that's exceedingly high by comparative standards.  It went, as we can see from the above, to expand its size.

And the Teton County Commissioners said no.

We now pick up the story from WyoFile, an online Wyoming newspaper:

JACKSON ­– At the behest of the Foster Friess family, a powerful state senator will carry a bill to override local control of a private school development.

Last week the Teton County commissioners refused to change land-use rules to accommodate the Friess family’s proposed Jackson Hole Classical Academy campus in a rural zone south of Jackson.

Sen. Eli Bebout (R-Riverton), immediate past president of the Senate, is a principal sponsor of Senate File 49 that would prohibit counties from controlling the location, use or occupancy of private schools provided they’re to be situated on at least 35 acres and enroll at least 50 students.

Now, I haven't, please note, ventured an opinion about the JHCA at all.  I'm not an opponent of private schools.  I'm not an opponent of religious private schools.  I support them for that matter.

But I am a bit amazed by the philosophical erosion here.  If we agree that some principal, localism, subsidiarity, or whatever, means that power should devolve as far down to the people as possible, and if that means that local governments make the call on such things, how can it be supported that the state should wrest control of such decisions in order to benefit private schools?

And if we think that's proper, why would we oppose the Federal Government interjecting on the same and highly related topics.  Lots of people in the state on the right have complained about the Federal Common Core mandate.  Surely those folks will oppose this bill, as it seeks to divest local control from the local?  I'm guessing that we'll hear nothing about it from that quarter however.

Principles are really tricky things.  When principles are seemingly compromised for objective, everything ultimately tends to be compromised long term.  I suppose here those supporting this effort will maintain that zoning regulations trump individual freedoms.  I've heard that argument before.  But the problem with that argument is that zoning regulations are imposed at the local level, and therefore express the intent and desires of those who live in an area.  Of course, those who take a radically libertarian view, and I'm not saying that Friess does, will argue that this is the very point.  Property rights, in their view, are so sacrosanct that, in their view, nobody should be able to touch them.

The ultimate problem with that view, and there are many problems with it, is that in the end it so favors the rich over everyone else that it creates a feudal system in regards to the ownership of property.  We all live on the same earth, and only for a time, so the entire concept that "it's my property and I should get to do with it what I want" is dead wrong.  For one reason, no how much property anyone person owns, sooner or later that person will be dead, and in the larger scheme of things it is in fact sooner rather than later.  No Medieval liege ,no matter how wealthy he was, owns a scrap of anything today as they're all dead.  The property lives on.

This gives a good basis for viewing some of the incidents of the ownership of land being collective rather than individual and that well known instinctual fact is the reason that zoning exists. . . so others don't monkey things up for everyone.  In Teton County its arguably the case that its a bit too late, as the county has become such a playground for the wealthy that those of more modest means really can't live there anymore, and there's something intrinsically wrong with that.

Be that as it may, the effort, which pits a determined interest that has lost at the local level against a local body in the state legislature is a really odd thing to see in Wyoming, which tends to support local control.  I don't see it working.  And if it does, the troublesome things that could come out of it won't be limited to education.