While Ronald Regan’s proclamation — at his own inauguration — that “government is the problem” set us on a slow march towards a day like January 6th, it was not that long ago that violence at the seat of our government seemed like the kind of thing that happened in Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, not here.

Then it happened here, on Trump’s watch. As president, it was very much his problem, and like most of his problems, it was totally self-made.

As November approaches, I just can’t see how anyone would like to go back to the days when every single dawn brought newspaper, television, and internet news outlets set fire by some new, outrageous development. Have we forgotten how tiring and grating it was to have the airwaves cluttered with the buzzsaw-like noise of the agitated left clashing with the reflexively defensive right every single day?

From his second day in office, when he lied to the CIA about how much larger his inauguration crowd was than Obama’s (to be clear: Trump’s was considerably smaller), then the Muslim travel ban, then Trump had to fire Michael Flynn, then Trump divulged classified information to Russia’s Foreign Minister in the Oval Office. That was just the first few months.

It was just exhausting.

It cannot be suggested that the ends justified the means. Trump’s accomplishments were few and unpopular. Most notably: a tax cut that a rapidly diminishing minority supported as it became increasingly obvious that it mostly benefits the rich at the expense of a massive increase in the federal deficit. Second place goes to the installation of three Supreme Court Justices whose vision of America is one with fewer rights, as demonstrated by the use of their new majority to issue an incredibly unpopular decision revoking a long-standing American right.

Say what you will about President Biden, he has one quality that I love in a president: He’s boring.

What? He fell asleep at a climate summit? Who among has not attended a meeting so dull it made our eyelids droopy? What, he confused some words? I can’t tell you how many times I have called one of my kids by another one of my kids’ names (or even the dog’s name) or how many times I arrive in the basement or the kitchen or the garage only to realize that I forgot why I set out for that destination in the first place. If you think it’s because I’m old, you should see how regularly my teenagers forget what they are doing halfway through a task.

But more to the point, sometimes I go days without hearing a news story about Biden.

It’s bliss.

Meanwhile, inflation (which was a global problem) is coming back under control, wage inequality is decreasing, infrastructure bills have been passed, a gun safety bill that enjoyed 76% of American voters’ support was signed into law, and if you think Biden is cramming environmental regulations down your throat and driving up fuel prices, did you know that the US is producing more oil now than ever before? Even more than when Trump was president?

I am not going to tell you that it is all sunshine and roses. For example: the border remains a mess (although the GOP’s decision to vote against the measures they negotiated to address the border makes it clear that they are about as serious about the border as they were about the deficit, which is to say, not at all serious).

In spite of the imperfect job Biden is doing, he has made tremendous progress on issues the majority of Americans support, and without the daily grinding down of our souls. I’ll take four more years of the sleepy guy over four more years of a president actively trying to divide us.

Will Wood is a small business owner, veteran, and half-decent runner. He lives, works, and writes in West Chester.

But the truth is that most of the times you have actually seen a firefighter, they were fixing someone’s air conditioner, teaching a class, plowing your street, practicing law, delivering the mail, or doing some other job that looks nothing like fighting a fire.

That’s because in Pennsylvania, more than 90% of all fire companies are staffed entirely by volunteers. These men and women have a wide variety of day jobs — often working for very understanding employers  — and spend a large share of their non-work hours doing a second job for their communities.

Firefighters are also pretty rare. Just one in every 430 Pennsylvanians is a member of a firehouse. That’s a huge drop from one in every 40 in the 1970s. Facing a 90% reduction in volunteers, many firehouses have had to close, consolidate, or respond to emergencies short-staffed.

On average, volunteers in this part of Pennsylvania spend more than 250 hours a year training. That’s more than five hours per week — more than six work-weeks per year — taking classes, drilling on fighting fires, training to provide basic life support, learning how to cut open cars, taking courses on hazardous materials, practicing rescue swimming and how to operate boats in flood conditions.

A lot of those hours — probably more than half — are focused on training firefighters how not to become a victim themselves during an emergency situation.

None of that includes taking emergency calls. In my area, companies respond to between 500 and 600 calls per year. Malfunctioning elevators, faulty carbon-monoxide detectors, burning food, young children accidentally locked in a car or house, downed trees, assisting ambulances, these types of calls feature heavily in the responses, and are treated with the same haste and urgency as a building fire.

At a national level, 45% of the calls come in during traditional work hours. Remember the part about very understanding employers? The firefighter arriving at an emergency probably just ran out of their day job, drove across town, threw on their fire gear (something they have trained to do in under a minute) and jumped on a truck a second or two before it pulled out of the fire house.

Calls that come in outside the hours of 9 and 5 are not much easier to staff. My son has been a volunteer firefighter for over two years. I have watched him leap up from the dinner table, heard him stumble out of bed in the middle of the night, and seen him dash out the door with hair still wet from a half-completed shower.

These volunteers also look after their fire house and their equipment. They routinely check all the tools they carry and the air bottles they rely on, they wash everything, from the gear they wear to the trucks they ride in, and they fix the things they can.

A fire company — just like any other company — has bills to pay, a budget to balance, policies to update, maintenance of the firehouse and all the equipment to schedule and track, and records to keep. Administering the fire company also falls to volunteers, and many fire companies are fortunate to have volunteers who devote their time to the office work.

While all the hours that are put into the typical fire company are volunteer — saving Pennsylvania’s taxpayers billions of dollars every year — the classes they take, the equipment they operate, the buildings they use, the gas, the electricity, the water, the insurance, these things all cost money.

It is amazing that we rely on a system of volunteers to help us in our darkest hours. It is even more amazing is that this system works, but fire companies need your support. When you see a firefighter standing at the corner with a bucket raising money, or you see a raffle, car wash, or other community event at the local fire house, or you receive a fundraising letter in the mail, the people who are asking are volunteers and every penny you give will be spent maintaining their ability to serve you and your community, so please, give them your support. We’re all counting on them.

Will Wood is a small business owner, veteran, and half-decent runner. He lives, works, and write in West Chester.

While my skill in coaching soccer was severely limited by my poor understanding of the game, I let the kids know on day one that we were there to have fun, and the league didn’t even count goals. Any good play, and we were all high-fives and applause. Most of them enjoyed the game enough to keep playing (with more skilled coaches).

Many of us have had good and bad coaches, and the impact of those coaches can last a lifetime. I still hear things my coaches said to me when I was a kid. One of the most common reasons kids love a sport — or leave it — is the coach. I have seen young people driven out of a sport they loved because a coach had only victory on his or her mind, and they figured the best way to get there was to somehow scare their athletes into it, but there is a much better way.

My first season coaching an elementary school running team was an unmitigated disaster. I had no control over the seven — just seven — runners in my charge. One day, somewhere between the Halloween parade and actual Halloween, the kids on my team were literally bouncing off the walls and taking turns throwing themselves into a trash can.

I had to figure out how to get them on track while also making the program fun, because if it wasn’t fun, why would they want to keep doing it? Running is already the hardest sport there is. It seems like the easiest, because even a toddler can do it, but getting better requires a lot of unpleasantness for incremental gains.

Heck, running is the sport that other sports’ coaches use as a punishment.

So I adopted a mantra from the Positive Coaching Alliance: That which gets rewarded gets done. This completely changed how I coached the team. To test it out, one day after a long run I asked if anyone wanted to join me for some voluntary sprints. About a third of the runners lined up with me. We ran sprints, and at the end of practice I gave them a special recognition.

The next time I offered voluntary sprints, the whole team lined up.

That running team went on to have great results. Even the YMCA — who used to oversee the program and the 5k race at the end — started calling us “The Mighty Hillsdale.” The team grew in popularity, too. By the spring of 2022 we had 90 runners, quite a few more than the seven on that first team. But the most rewarding thing is that some of my former runners have returned to coach with me.

I want to be clear that positive coaching is not the same as a “participation trophy” approach. In fact, on our team, we only give out three awards each year. For the first — which we call “The Kuegler” — the team votes in secret for who has worked the hardest at each practice, all season long (and they cannot vote for themselves). The second award is for most improved fitness. The third is the most improved 5k.

We are the only running team I know of that does not have a trophy for the fastest runner. Our entire focus is on rewarding effort because it takes practice to get better, and it takes motivation to go practice. Those trophies have been a great way to motivate young athletes to put in some grueling miles, but so are the daily recognitions we give to a few runners for hard work or being a good teammate.

By far the single most important thing I have learned about coaching youth sports over the years is this: the chances that you could be coaching a future world-class athlete are almost zero, but the chances that you could be coaching a future youth coach are huge.

So be the coach you loved as a kid, and your impact will last long after the season is over.

Will Wood is a small business owner, veteran, and half-decent runner. He lives, works, and writes in West Chester.

Earlier this week, lawmakers in Harrisburg were considering a tax credit for teachers who spend their own money on these kinds of school supplies. There is already a federal tax credit of up to $300 for teachers who purchase items for their classrooms.

The Pennsylvania tax credit would be capped at $500 per teacher and limited to a statewide total of $15 million per year. That’s enough for 30,000 of Pennsylvania’s teachers. Since there are four times that many public-school teachers in Pennsylvania, this credit may only go to a lucky few.

The teachers I know routinely spend money out of their own pockets to buy classroom supplies. Tissues and pencils have always been at the top of the list, but also posters, whiteboard markers, and books. In fact, many of the books and educational games on a teacher’s shelves were paid for out of the teacher’s pocket.

Teachers start acquiring these things in the first years they are teaching, when they are being paid the least, and so can least afford it. In many districts, teachers also make requests of parents at the beginning of the year for supplies. My children’s district discourages teachers from requesting supplies for their classrooms from parents because the administration does not want it to seem like classroom budgets were somehow short.

This has just placed more of the burden on teachers.

It is deeply concerning that we are seriously considering this measure instead of finding a way to provide each teacher with a budget for classroom supplies that will cover all the things they need to create the kinds of environments that will ensure success for all of Pennsylvania’s students. It is hard to tell which is more troubling: the fact that Pennsylvania is only just now considering this tax credit or the fact that our teachers find themselves having to spend their own money on supplies in the first place.

To add to that, online retailers and big-box stores ensure that supplies cost pretty much the same everywhere in Pennsylvania. But teachers are not paid the same everywhere in Pennsylvania. Wealthy districts can offer higher salaries, so they will have teachers who can spend more on supplies. This will make their classrooms better equipped than districts with smaller budgets, thereby worsening the gap between haves and have-nots.

We have had a problem prioritizing education in this country for a while. How is it possible that we can justify paying 53 grown men the same amount to play football a few Sundays a year that we spend educating 10,000 students in Pennsylvania? It is not just sports, a Leonardo da Vinci painting can set a museum back twice as much. Patrons of the movie “Avatar” have spent enough over the years to educate 139,000 students. The cost overruns alone for building the USS Gerald R. Ford could have educated 190,000 students (the cost of the whole ship could have educated 633,000).

I think most of us would agree that teaching is the most important profession on planet Earth. One selfish example: when I am really old my doctors are going to be people being educated right now, so I want them to have really, really good educations. So should you.

We should not have to worry that students who could have gone on to be the best doctors, or scientists, or policy makers, or whatever just didn’t have any good books to read in fifth grade, so they never found the inspiration to take their education seriously. Moreover, we should not place the burden of supplying those books on our already over-stretched teachers.

While we probably need this legislation right now, the problem with it is that it seems to tacitly accept that we will never give teachers the funding they need to do the job we want them to do, so instead we are going to try to make buying school supplies a little more palatable to them.

Surely we can do better.

Will Wood is a small business owner, veteran, and half-decent runner. He lives, works, and writes in West Chester.

Let me start at the beginning. Before the 1990s, all agents worked for sellers. The person driving you all over town all day long, showing you a dozen houses, counseling you on good neighborhoods, and helping you negotiate? They worked for the seller. This was an obvious conflict of interest.

That is why, during the 1990s, states started introducing buyers’ agency laws. Buyers’ agency ensures that real estate buyers could also have an independent agent bound by law to represent their best interest. Buyers’ agents are typically paid via a commission split that the sellers and their agents agree to pay.

Although much of the recent coverage of the NAR suit make it seem as though these commission splits are cheating homeowners and inflating real estate prices, the reality is that — like everything in real estate —commissions are negotiable.

In Pennsylvania, the standard Pennsylvania Association of REALTORS (PAR) listing contract has a place for the broker’s fee, and it is blank. Above the blank it specifically says that there is no set or recommended fee. There is also a place for if and how that commission will be shared with a buyers’ agent, and that too is blank. While real estate markets seem to have settled into patterns for what agents charge and what the split is, I can tell you that when I used to sell houses, there were times I was working for three different sellers at three different commission rates and with three different commission splits.

To understand the NAR settlement, you need to know that listing agents advertise commission splits through the Multiple Listing Service (MLS). The MLS was created by REALTORS to promote their sellers’ homes. Advertising the commission split lets buyers’ agents know that they will be compensated and ensures this compensation doesn’t need to be a negotiation point between buyers and sellers.

The settlement agreement with NAR will do away with this form of advertising. Moreover, it will require buyers and buyers’ agents to enter into a contract before the agent shows buyers a home. Stop and think about that for a moment. If you find a house you want to see, under the mandate of the NAR settlement agreement, you will have to sign a contract with an agent to go inside.

Because the commission split will no longer be advertised, alternative arrangements will have to be made for ensuring buyers’ agents are compensated. Either buyers’ agents will have to include their commission in the sale negotiation or seek compensation directly from buyers.

The former could be a test of whether comingling negotiations over commissions with negotiations over the sale of homes is detrimental to buyers and sellers. Since the PAR listing contract includes a section about splits, this could become little more than a formality, but sellers might see this as an opportunity to reduce their expenses by cutting out buyers’ agents. Some have suggested that this could lead to a rise in “flat fee” agency, which seems like a boon to sellers. This would actually be regressive, because the fee would be a smaller share of what a seller with a higher-priced home will make.

If buyers’ agents have to seek commissions from buyers, it could severely impact the ability of buyers to retain a buyers’ agent. Paying an agent may be cost prohibitive, and the money a buyer would have to pay an agent could have been used for a larger down payment or covering closing costs.

Working with buyers is already harder than working with sellers. You can have signs in 100 yards at one time, but you can’t show homes to 100 buyers at one time. Making it harder for buyers’ agents to receive fair compensation will make it harder to find buyers’ agents.

I don’t think any of us can really predict what this settlement will mean for buyers — who make up a fairly important half of the real estate market — but my instinct tells me that agents are going to be less inclined to work with buyers, and I do not see how that will benefit them in the long run.

Will Wood is a small business owner, veteran, and half-decent runner. He lives, works, and writes in West Chester.

This was a beautifully Bill Wood moment.

I told him I wanted to educate myself before picking a party. He said he saw the wisdom in wanting to learn more, but he also explained to me that independents in Pennsylvania do not get to vote in primaries, and so I should probably pick a party so that I could have a voice in setting the direction of one of the parties.

I shared this story with my son because I want him to have the largest opportunity to shape the course of our local, state, and federal governments with his vote. When he said he wasn’t sure which party better represented his views, I offered him the following observation.

Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden all had their first two years to work with a friendly Congress. This being the case, a very good test of each party’s priorities — not campaign promises, but the policies they will actually pursue when in power — would be to look at what the parties accomplished when they had unified control over the legislative and executive branches.

And here’s what happened:

The Democrats used Obama’s first two years to pass the Affordable Care Act. While opponents said there would be death panels and long lines and this would blow up the deficit, voters did not buy it, and the ACA had a thin margin of support: 46% favored it, 40% did not. Today there is a substantial approval gap, with 59% in favor and 39% opposed.

During Trump’s first two years, congressional Republicans — who had voted over 60 times to repeal the ACA while Obama was president — spent months trying to find the political will to cast the same vote when they knew a Republican president would sign the repeal into law. The fact is, the ACA had become too popular in Red states to risk repealing it.

Republicans did pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. This brainless child of Paul Ryan had a meager 29% approval rating before it was passed. This law did blow up the deficit and, as a bonus, it largely favored the richest Americans at the future expense of everyone else.

Democrats spent Biden’s first two years passing the American Rescue Plan, a pandemic stimulus plan. Then they passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a long overdue expansion of background checks for gun purchasers. Next up was the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, a huge investment in our country’s aging infrastructure. They followed that with the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Together, these latter three bills are the largest investment we have made in our country’s future since Eisenhower was president.

As important as what these bills accomplished: Every one of them had approval ratings of between 55% and 73%.

So, on the one hand you have a party that passed laws that increased access to healthcare, increased the requirement for background checks for gun purchasers, and invested in our nation’s future, all of which enjoyed the support of the majority of our electorate (that’s how democracy is supposed to work).

On the other hand, you have a party that passed a tax cut that largely favored the rich and tried — but ultimately lacked the courage — to end the ACA. In addition, the Republicans seated three Supreme Court Justices, all of whom indicated at their hearings that Roe v. Wade was “settled law.” That lasted until the first opportunity they had to relitigate the settled law and take away what had been an American right for nearly 50 years.

Not a single one of these things had the support of the electorate.

One party passes popular bills to improve our country’s future, the other pushes an anti-majoritarian agenda that sets us back. It’s a pretty clear choice to me, but I have not peeked at my son’s registration to see if he shares my views or not.

Will Wood is a small business owner, veteran, and half-decent runner. He lives, works, and writes in West Chester.

I have prepared appraisals for somewhere around a hundred legal cases, but I have only had to actually testify in court five or six times. In this case, the attorney who hired me wanted me on hand for all of the testimony, so I joined the proceedings right after jury selection.

The judge entered the courtroom before the jury and invited the attorneys to go through an unsettled list of pre-trial items. Questions were asked, rulings were made or promised, outstanding objections noted.

Seeing the attorneys in this setting, without a jury present, was revealing. There is a certain amount of theatrics to trying a case before a jury. No, it’s not like Hollywood’s version of courtroom drama, but trial attorneys know a bit about bluff and bluster. But without the jury present, they were polite, direct, and steeped in the language of law.

There are a lot of jokes about how often attorneys lie, but as advocates — while they are not allowed to lie— they are expected to make the best case for their client. Even if they know that their client is guilty, the attorney’s duty is to provide the best defense available. So the attorney’s job — the job we expect them to do — is to downplay evidence that hurts their client’s case, call into question witness testimony when it is unhelpful, and provide evidence that supports alternative theories.

This is an occasional source of tension between attorneys and appraisers. Appraisers are not allowed to advocate at all. We are bound by state law to be neutral, disinterested, and unmotivated by how our estimated value might help or hurt our clients. Attorneys have a hard time understanding this about appraisers, and appraisers have a hard time understanding why their attorney clients are always asking for a “high” number or a “low” number. We are trained to give the right number.

Throughout the three days that I was in that courtroom, I studied procedure. There were a lot of objections. There were dozens of sidebars on the side of the bench further away from the jury. There were also times when the jury was asked to leave, and the attorneys would talk openly with the judge. There was a lot of standing and sitting.

The case evolved in fits and starts, with small gains and losses over the phrasing of a question. Attorneys were trying to gauge the changing mood of the jury while witnesses were examined or cross examined. At times, a few pages of evidence were presented. One counselor was building a case brick by brick while the other simultaneously tried to disassemble the same case, brick by brick.

There were no “ah-ha!” moments like you would see on TV or the big screen. There were no rousing speeches. There were no verbal traps. No over-the-top courtroom flair. No swelling of tense background music.

But it was riveting to watch.

I came away from the experience with an increased respect for our legal system. The work attorneys put in on behalf of their clients is huge. The hours judges put in listening to cases, trying to thread the needle between the objections so both parties can have a fair hearing, often working well past the hours when the jury has gone home. The solemn and mysterious roles of the other officers of the court. And the jury themselves, spending hours upon hours focused on someone else’s problem.

I have known for years that what we have is not a perfect system, but I cannot think of a better way to sort out our legal differences. Even having been to a few court proceedings where I was not a witness, on top of having testified myself, it was interesting and immersive lesson in civics. Maybe when I’m retired, I’ll skip the matinee and take in some court cases.

Will Wood is a small business owner, veteran, and half-decent runner. He lives, works, and writes in West Chester.

After World War II, the threat of the USSR expanding into a war-weakened Europe was so significant that Dwight Eisenhower spent two years trying to bolster support in Europe for the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Eisenhower — a Republican who later went on to be one of our greatest presidents — served as NATO’s first Supreme Allied Commander.

Later, President Ronald Reagan relied on NATO to help consign Marxism-Leninism to the ash-heap of history. When I think of the lengths to which Reagan went to dismantle the Soviet Union, the sky was the limit. No peacetime president before him increased the deficit more. Even while Reagan was slashing social programs, he was ratcheting up defense spending in a very conspicuous arms race with the sole objective of bankrupting the Soviets, and NATO was Reagan’s favorite collaborator.

George W. Bush partnered with our NATO allies when they invoked NATO’s Article 5 (which says that an attack on one member will be considered an attack on all members). NATO sent their own troops and equipment to fight alongside us in Afghanistan after the September 11th attacks.

Being a leader in NATO and taking a hard line against Russian imperialism were a cornerstone of what the GOP stood for not too long ago.

Flash forward to January 2022. Russian President Vladimir Putin massed over 125,000 military personnel along the Ukrainian border. Putin — clever man that he is — said that these troops and the ships he was sending into the Black Sea were just part of an exercise.

When President Biden began publicly warning of a Russian invasion, the reaction across the political spectrum was the equivalent of raising a single eyebrow: Scare quotes were used. Biden’s grasp on world affairs was questioned. His mental acuity was scrutinized (some things never change). Political cartoons were inked. If I am being honest, even I was skeptical. How could Putin hope to pull this off? It’s 2022, not 1939. You can’t just invade another country.

Then Putin ordered his illegal invasion without even bothering to propose a flimsy premise.

Unsurprisingly, Biden did not waste any time saying, “I told you so,” instead he quietly used his energies to unite European nations in rallying to Ukraine’s aid. We probably did too little.

When I was in high school, a different authoritarian massed troops at his neighbor’s border and then rolled in. The country being invaded requested assistance from the UN, and the US led the prosecution of one of the most lopsided wars in history. Forty-three days later, Desert Storm was over, and the world’s fourth largest military was reduced to a far-flung collection of shattered fragments slowly eroding in the desert.

It is 100% clear to me that Ukraine has deserved our aid at least as much as Kuwait did. It is also clear to me that as the war drags on, our national support for it will only continue to dwindle. Putin believes we are weak, that we lack resolve, and he is counting on our fatigue. I am shocked so many Americans are willing to oblige him.

Meanwhile, we are experiencing whiplash as the heirs to Reagan’s party flipflop. First, it’s full-throated support of defending Ukraine against Reagan’s old adversary. Then it’s only supporting Ukraine if we also take drastic measures to address the US/Mexico border. Next, on the eve of achieving that, they pull the plug on a deal that they chiefly authored. Doubling back, they insisted that a bill providing aid to Ukraine be presented on the floor in a manner that gave them the right to try to add additional measures that do include US/Mexico border policies.

What a roller-coaster.

I know I am not alone on either side of the political divide in suggesting that if we believe that Russia’s illegal invasion of its neighbor is something we should address, if preserving our role as a global leader is important to not only our identity but our own preservation, then we should address the invasion in a straight-forward and decisive manner.

But former president (and third-time-but-still-no-charm candidate) Donald Trump is suggesting not only that NATO is dispensable but that Russia can take whatever countries it wants. What’s worse, Trump seems to have convinced a surprisingly large portion of GOP leaders in Washington that dereliction is somehow the better part of valor.

Will Wood is a small business owner, veteran, and half-decent runner. He lives, works, and writes in West Chester.

During that hearing, dozens of residents pointed out many of the problems with the application. At the first hearing, approximately 9% of the public comments made were in favor of VFCA.

The application to use tax dollars included language that made it clear that VFCA was only intended for people of a “Western heritage.” The applicant promoted their school on social media sites devoted to anti-LGBTQ+ content. The history curriculum included significant New Testament moments, but not an equal share of moments from other religions.

Even if one is Western, heterosexual, and Christian, it is clear that not everyone in the district is, and therefore this slant is not an equitable use of tax dollars.

But there was more. The long-range plan was to have 39 classes, but their building plan only calls for 34 classrooms. The budget included a math error of at least $1.25 million. There was a shocking number of typos, misspellings, faulty grammar, missing punctuation, incomprehensible sentences, at least one made up Latin word, and a place where it said, “school name here.”

The employee handbook was copied from Maryland’s Anne Arundel County Public Schools, including references to “AACPS” and the phone number for Anne Arundel’s Human Resources office.

The applicant testified during that hearing that there were no significant changes it felt it needed to make to the application. The applicant also testified that they had spent three years writing the application. Yet somehow the applicant felt that, in spite of all these errors, they were qualified to teach people.

Against that backdrop, it would seem to make sense for VFCA to revise the application and resubmit it. One would imagine, after the public shellacking they took the first time, that they would address the multitudinous concerns of the taxpayers who would be on the hook to support VFCA (to the tune of $11 million per year).

But the revised application still has a generous helping of bad grammar, spelling, logic, math, the same problems of exclusion, and, most shockingly, the same Anne Arundel Human Resources phone number.

One of the items that came to light last summer was that the school did not intend to provide any food to students — did not even have a kitchen — an obvious sign that low-income students would not be welcome. One revision the applicant made is that they will participate in the federal reduced lunch program, but it also says that they will not be providing lunch (and they still have no kitchen). It says that they will ask families to contribute snacks which can be distributed to those who do not bring a lunch.

Their lunch plan for low-income students is donated snacks. And they will seek federal funds. But those funds are not in the budget, and neither are expenditures for lunch, so how much federal money is expected and how it will be spent is unexplained.

It is not surprising that once again not a single member of the WCASD board — Republican or Democrat — voted to approve the VFCA charter.

No, the most surprising facet of this second application is that VFCA began circulating a petition to appeal the WCASD decision to the Charter School Appeal Board, and VFCA started planning and promoting petition signing events before the actual hearing.

They never intended to be approved by the school board. They intended, from the outset, to circumvent the duly elected WCASD school board entirely.

VFCA is framing their petition efforts as a matter of school choice. Don’t be fooled. The WCASD is not opposed to charter schools as a rule. In fact, the board recently approved renewing the Collegium Charter School’s charter. Heck, one of the board members is a teacher at Collegium.

VFCA is pretending that their poor public reception and inability to muster even one vote from the board is about school choice. They should instead be focused on the fact that the community has spoken — twice —and found that VFCA would not be a service to this community.

Will Wood is a small business owner, veteran, and half-decent runner. He lives, works, and writes in West Chester.

More probably, the editors offered me this space because they were tired of reading my letters.

I have received a wide range of feedback since I started. Some of my favorite comments have been unfavorable, but amusing. In response to a column I wrote about how nearly 90% of Americans believe we should have universal background checks for gun purchases, one lady wrote simply, “Beta male.”

In response to another piece where I connected the American Colonies boycotting British imports (and occasionally throwing them into the harbor) to “cancel culture,” a gentleman wrote, “I’d like to teach this guy a history lesson.”

Some of the feedback appears to be in direct reaction to the only part of the column that I do not usually write: the headline. This happens often enough that my brother-in-law once suggested I write a column called, “I don’t write these headlines.”

I have also run into people who had nice things to say about something I wrote. My favorite feedback, though, came from one of my father’s old friends. He contacted me to say that my dad would be proud of the writing I am doing, even if he would have disagreed with everything I write.

But lately the feedback I have been hearing a lot is not about me. It is about local newspapers generally, and how they too often have news items from other places. This feedback has brought me all the way back to my very first official column, “Support your local newspaper.”

I know I am preaching to the choir here, but the importance of a local newspaper cannot be overstated. Who but a local journalist is going to attend a township meeting to document a proposed subdivision, or sit in on a trial of local importance, or interview the members of a school board, or run a piece on a new, locally-owned coffee shop?

Being in the Philadelphia suburbs, we have the four major television network affiliates running news shows. These focus heavily on Philadelphia, only occasionally sending reporters out here for a story. When I was growing up, to find out what was happening here, our parents had subscriptions to the local paper.

As a member of Generation X, I take my share of the blame for news’s decline. When I was at my first job out of grad school —serving as an intelligence officer — I read the news online. That was back before paywalls, back when the Internet promised that ad revenue alone would cover the cost of running just about anything. When that turned out not to be the case, my generation had a hard time adjusting to the idea that we would have to pay for news.

The steady decline in subscriptions led to the steady paring of jobs in news. As the jobs were shed, fewer local stories could be written, and so the papers lost more local subscribers. This cycle has cost the U.S. around 3,000 local papers and 43,000 journalists over the last two decades. This has put many communities in a position where there is no local reporting, and all the news comes from national or regional news sources or from social media.

Social media is great for seeing what your cousins or old friends are up to, but it is not a source of unbiased, in-depth news about your community. Plus, you may have noticed, both national news and social media have tended towards partisan extremism.

Cancelling your subscription because the local reporting is scarce will ensure that there is even less, or none. The best remedy for this problem is to get more people interested in subscribing to local newspapers. The alternative is to live in a news desert where you only hear from national candidates who couldn’t find your town on a map or someone with an axe to grind working alone at a keyboard in their kitchen.

Will Wood is a small business owner, veteran, and half-decent runner. He lives, works, and writes in West Chester.