A question about what government should be

After a week in which voters sent a message about what government shouldn’t be, here’s a story – and a question – about what government can do.

It begins with Anthony Shaheen, who is 23 years old and a Charlotte native. Last year, the Appalachian State grad took a job as an environmental educator for the Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation Department. Last fall, he helped start an outdoor club at McClintock Middle School.

McClintock is a Charlotte-Mecklenburg Title 1 school, with at least three-quarters of its population qualifying for free or reduced-price lunches. Each of the 25 boys and girls who joined Shaheen’s club were considered “at-risk” by the school system.

The idea behind the outdoor club was simple: Give the kids an appreciation of nature. In the first year, club members built and tended a school garden with plants native to North Carolina. They went on four field trips to the McDowell Nature Center, where Shaheen works.

On their first hike, a middle-schooler reached down for an acorn, then held it up. “What is this?” he asked.

“They were unaware,” Shaheen says. “I figured in Charlotte, there’s a lot of green space and they’d get a chance to stumble on those things. But they hadn’t had that opportunity.”

So the kids learned. Eagerly. They picked up salamanders and identified trees and fished. They felt wonder in their hands, breathed awe in the cool air of a campsite. And the more they learned, the more they wanted to.

Shaheen also saw bigger changes, measurable changes. Members of his club had a 5 percent decrease in documented misbehavior at McClintock. They had 40 percent fewer unexcused absences.

In part, the improvement came from kids knowing if they messed up, they’d lose participation in the club. But the behavior ran deeper than that. Shaheen remembers that at the beginning of the year, it took club members about 15 minutes to start losing focus. “By the end, you could put a fishing pole in their hand, and they would spend an entire hour content to cast,” he says.

The changes have been so transformative that Shaheen and his colleagues want to expand the club’s concept. Their idea: Take the land at Copperhead Island on Lake Wylie and turn it into a camp for at-risk kids. The county leases the property for $1 a year from Duke Energy. The park department would need, however, to build cabins and a mess hall; the cost could be about $200,000.

And this is the point where some of you say: Whoa.

Is it government’s role to build a camp for disadvantaged children, no matter how worthy the effort might be?

It’s the kind of debate we’ll be having often now, as lawmakers from Washington to Mecklenburg not only confront dire budget shortfalls, but quake at the thought of angering the already angry voter.

Make no mistake: The wave we saw on election night was not merely a tea party phenomenon. It was sustained by moderate voters who reacted to policies that felt less like short-term solutions to crisis than philosophical shifts on the role of government. A lot of Americans felt rightly squeamish about that. And so, we had Tuesday.

But the danger following any election is the pendulum swings too far. The Wild West recklessness of the Bush years resulted in the regulatory overreaching of the Obama administration. Now, it’s fashionable to want to go on a crash government diet.

In that climate, Shaheen and his colleagues have done a smart thing. With budgets getting slashed, they’ve solicited grants from the private sector to help fund programs, including the second year of McClintock’s outdoor club. Shaheen also has asked foundations and others about helping develop the Copperhead Island camp.

It would be a fine way to build a fine program – and not at all unprecedented. Our city and county are full of such public-private partnerships.

But, yes, they do include government. The reality is that sometimes, government has the best resources and willingness to serve us. The challenge, however, is not to lazily assume that’s always so.

Anthony Shaheen doesn’t really think in those terms. He was much more interested this week in talking about kids, not budgets. He defines his work by the impact it has and the successes he sees, not whom he works for.

When we look at his program, and others in this new era, we should judge them the same way.