Dawidziak: School votes also teach civics

Our country's founders were a bunch of real smart people. Truly they were. They weren't content to just sit back and admire their achievements. Declaring independence from their mother country, leading a war effort to an improbable victory against the superpower of their day -- it wasn't enough for them. Neither was forging a government, an experiment that at the time would be the only democracy on the face of the Earth.

No, along with their many other talents, they also dabbled in prophecy. With amazing accuracy, they predicted the consequences not only of their successes, but also of their failures.

They foresaw the rift in the country that would result from their inability to handle slavery -- one of the rare instances when the founders kicked the can down the road. The results were tragic and catastrophic.

One of the rare problems they did not foresee -- in fact, it would have been incomprehensible to them -- is today's voter apathy. The founders lived in a world dominated by monarchies, where the vast majority of people had no say in who passed the laws or sat in judgment. They would never have believed that, given the opportunity to directly elect executives, representatives and judges, American citizens would simply not vote.

It would have been tantamount to saying "no thanks" to the freedoms so dearly paid for by the struggle for independence and choosing oppression instead. Indeed, citizens complain all the time of the oppression of government regulation and over-taxation. These oppressions are often the direct result of an electorate that is not plugged in and not turning out.

The two biggest threats to a working democracy are ignorance and apathy. Voters say they don't know and they don't care. Conversely, there's a freedom people enjoy when they do exercise that right to have a say in who their leaders will be.

Why bring this up now, and not when a general election is in sight? Because Tuesday is Election Day for all the school districts across Long Island.

These elections historically have abysmally low turnouts. Last year's turnout was predictably slight, with far under 20 percent of registered voters in Nassau and Suffolk counties showing up to vote on their school budgets. Since school districts make up 65 percent to 70 percent of peoples' skyrocketing property tax bills, you might think next week's elections would produce a record high turnout. Alas, most political experts are not predicting this will be the case.

It's a dichotomy in politics today that voters tend not to participate in the elections that have the most direct impact on their pocketbooks. Presidential elections produce the highest of passions and the highest voter turnouts. But local elections like those in school districts can have a point-blank effect on residents' finances. How the school district is run also has a direct impact on the housing market and an ancillary effect on the business community.

So we should be as incredulous as the founders surely would be at this abdication of voter responsibility. In a democracy, the voters have not just rights but responsibilities. The founders created a participatory form of government, and it doesn't work if citizens don't participate.

There are many threats from hostile external forces facing our country today. The biggest threat to our form of government, however, might very well be internal. We're only 235 years into the founders' experiment -- a mere blip in history. Of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, the smart money says that none of them would have missed a school district election.