On Oct. 6, the night of the Franklin County Technical School vote, I kept a record of how I, a current student, felt.
7:09 p.m.: Fifty-one minutes till the voting booths close. It’s for my school. I graduate next year. I know I won’t reap the rewards of the new school building. No student currently in the building will. But I care. I’m not even of voting age, but I care.
7:11 p.m.: Why do I care? I won’t experience it. Why did I show up to online and in-person hearings around the county to show support? Why did I talk to voters and ramble to my friends at the lunch table about all the news?
7:15 p.m.: What more could I have done? Could I have shown up to more meetings or talked to more people? With such slim margins in local elections, one social media post, one discussion, one question can be the difference. I hope I’ve done enough. But I know I’m not alone.
7:20 p.m.: My mind keeps circling back to the same students. They struggled in their sending schools, some of them narrowly getting in after years of toeing the line between suspensions, bad grades and struggles with peers. If this doesn’t pass, could fewer of them make it here? This school has quite literally saved the lives of so many.
7:23 p.m.: The St. Patrick’s Day power outage last school year was a symptom of the electrical problems the school faces right now. We were working hard on a class project up in the shop that week, and we had to push a test back a whole week because of that outage. I was happy there was no school, but looking back months later, I worry. What if it had come closer to major test and test-prep season? I feel like a nerd for thinking this way! It’s just a free day off.
7:35 p.m.: I hope this works. I’m confident. Or am I? I have to worry about my neighbors, too. This isn’t just about the students. It’s about the adults, too: homeowners and renters. If this fails, I can’t blame them. With wave after wave of new projects, like the Montague library, I can’t imagine anyone isn’t worried. No matter how this ends, I wish I could tell them that students and supporters aren’t upset.
8:02 p.m.: The votes are now in. The polls have closed. I don’t know the results, but on tiny slips of paper across 19 towns, they sit ready to be counted. Future careers for those stepping up into tech next year, and future students who aren’t even a twinkle in their future parents’ eyes. Their careers and experience in high school will be determined by those pieces of paper.
10:20 p.m.: I went to check the results one final time before bed, and it looks good. But not so much at the same time. I want to be happy, because “yes” has won by a good margin: 584 votes in the unofficial count. But I see 3,522 negative votes. That’s 3,522 neighbors, many of them probably wondering how they will factor this into their yearly expenses. I can’t call this a victory for everyone. There is no good and evil here — just taxes and buildings.
Looking back the next morning, my hometown of Greenfield voted against the measure. And honestly? That makes me even more proud to be from Greenfield. People took time out of their busy days to vote how they wanted. Many of them likely knew current students, teachers and alumni, and still had the courage to make their voices heard, even if their vote might disappoint people they know.
But for me, there is a moment of relief. Somewhere there’s a future freshman I’ll never meet, who isn’t even born yet. One day they’ll walk into a building with lights that don’t flicker, go into every classroom and not see a leaking roof. And they’ll never know how many people stood outside in October to make that happen.
I am proud to be a neighbor of the “no” voters, and I am proud to be a student at Franklin County Technical School.
Aidan Pasic lives in Greenfield.