Last year, I considered running for the Boulder Valley School District board. I thought that my communication skills and journalism experience would benefit the board’s being more transparent and accountable, and I also had (have) strong opinions on how BVSD handled issues like bullying, equitable treatment for all students and academic achievement. But after learning more about the extensive time commitments — two official meetings each month, another work session, and all of the reading, meeting prep, visiting schools, and more — I decided not to run. Those who serve on the board devote countless hours to doing work that would be paid in other circumstances. They bring expertise and professionalism to the job. Compensating them with a modest stipend seems fair.

I appreciated outgoing board president Kathy Gebhardt’s concern about paying board members when some BVSD staff are significantly underpaid. But conflating board stipends with insufficient employee compensation isn’t particularly useful. Clearly, BVSD should raise salaries and hourly wages for the lowest-paid workers.

While I support the stipend, I see several flaws in the program’s implementation. The first is that members must request compensation; this could prove divisive and be used to paint those who want compensation as “greedy” or “selfish.” Pay them or don’t, but be consistent. To that end, compensation should be made available to all of the members, not just the newly elected. As for me, I have no regrets about not running. And I can honestly say that I would have made the same choice even with the promise of this stipend. People are either called to do the work or they’re not.

Rachel Walker, rodellwalker@gmail.com

The notion that School Board members should serve without compensation grows out of the same assumption that brought us the Electoral College and a Senate in which small states wield disproportionate influence. This often-implicit assumption holds that ordinary people — presumably including those who need to work for money — are not as capable as more privileged ones to serve in the public interest. For example, one board member opposed the stipend because it would favor the interests of board members over those of other stakeholders. This argument mischaracterizes a measure designed to improve our entire educational system as individually self-serving. Indeed, if ability and willingness to work for free were correlated with ethical behavior, Ivanka and Jared would be models of integrity.

The conflation of pro bono service with high ethical standards comes dangerously close to the rationale for what became known as the “Lavender Scare,” the purge of “homosexuals” from the government that started in the 1950s and lasted until the 1970s. This clearly unconstitutional practice was justified by the assumption that LGBT individuals would be more susceptible to blackmail because of their secret, stigmatized identity. This is similar to the assumption that a lower income and consequent need for compensation, another stigmatized status in our society, renders individuals more susceptible to self-serving motives and behaviors. We assign a particular status to an individual, stigmatize the status and then treat that status as a justification for unfair treatment.

Insisting on pro bono board service clearly discriminates against the less privileged in our society — the group that most rely on public education to achieve upward mobility. The rationale for not compensating school board members rests on an anachronistic ideal of a government run by “gentlemen” motivated by noblesse oblige. There are far better Enlightenment ideas to perpetuate — such as respect for science.

Elyse Morgan, emorgan2975@gmail.com

The controversy over compensation for service on the Boulder Valley school board betrays the challenges of political representation. Low-income people, especially racial minorities and women, are unable to reduce their hours devoted to home care and full-time jobs for nominal pay.

Yet, as Harvard political sociologist Robert Putnam writes, civil society in the U.S. is declining. This group of organizations includes schools and universities, churches and cultural industries. They are training grounds for democracy.

To thwart the ongoing democratic malaise, political participation must be incentivized. After all, recruitment for public office, including school boards, is a building block of democratic life.

The market system, however, constrains active participation. This system seeks to gin up profit by paying people less. Low-wage and poorly paid work often become no-wage work.

A large part of the job market consists of volunteerism and unpaid positions: apprenticeships, internships, care work, honorary adjunct teaching and most NCAA athletics.

The rub is that altruism doesn’t pay the bills. The notion that a creative job such as serving on a school board or teaching is a “labor of love” is disingenuous. Officials like Mayor Eric Adams of New York City spin this idea: “Teaching is a calling. You don’t do it for money; you do it because you believe in the kids that come into your classroom.”

For many workers, the only option is dead-end jobs. In his landmark book, “Bullshit Jobs,” the anthropologist David Graeber explains that countless job holders — for example, in telemarketing and call centers — see their work as meaningless or even pernicious. They are disillusioned, alienated from political and economic life.

In this context, genuinely compensating school board members is but one step toward softening the jagged edges of market competition and enhancing our collective well-being.

Jim Mittelman, jhmittelman@yahoo.com

My first hot take is that not only do we not lack candidates willing to do the job as a volunteer, but we have a competition for the job, i.e. an election. Hence, there is no reason to pay a stipend. That’s in stark contrast to police officers, where it appears we need to increase pay in order to attract more and better candidates.

Serving on the school board is a public service, similar to donating your time at a homeless shelter — working and contributing to your community. Only in this case, the incentives for some are great: Their kids might currently be going to school in the BVSD.

And while I’m doing hot takes, here’s another one: Only voters with children attending BVSD should vote for school board members. They are the ones with the most skin in the game. People with radically different views on education from yours controlling what and how your kids are taught is pretty distasteful, and not everyone has the means to pull kids out of BVSD and send them to private schools.

My friend even moved out of state in part to get his kids into a different learning environment. It seems reasonable that the people who are most affected by the school board should be the ones who vote. Or, maybe, their votes should be augmented by the number of kids they have of school age. Say, a mother with two kids has her vote count as three — herself plus her kids. Same for all parents with kids in BVSD.

I don’t like policies that benefit everyone but only a subset of society pays for, such as taxes on gambling that subsidize schools. It’s easy to vote for a benefit if someone else has to pay for it. And it’s easy to vote for certain policies or candidates if your kids aren’t being directly affected by them.

Bill Wright, bill@wwwright.com