When the Sullivan West capital project plan pamphlet arrived in the mail, one thought immediately sprang to mind: This work won't affect my child. 

Should the project garner voter approval this week, work would all begin after my daughter's graduation in the spring. 

The thought was followed almost immediately by a second: Whelp, I'd better find out what's involved so I can decide how I should vote on Wednesday. 

For 13 years, my mind has looked at our local school through the lens of a parent. Decisions made have had a direct impact on my family, and so they have felt personal. 

Graduation will shift my lens, will shift that impact. 

And yet, the impact remains. 

People who don't have children in a district or whose children have long since graduated may rankle at the idea that they have to pay for improvements on their local school. But public education isn't about our own children. 

Our founding fathers laid the groundwork for publicly funded schools with the understanding that educating a community's children was an investment in the community's future.  Massachusetts legislator Horace Mann then came on the scene in the 1830s to push the nation into a system of free schooling for all American children, based on the premise that it would lead to more literate and productive citizens. 

Mann certainly had his flaws, but as he once said, “Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.”

It wasn't about any one child. It was about them all. 

And while it would take more than a century for his dreams to become reality, the public education system we have today is about all of us in a community, whether or not our children are in the school system, whether or not we even have children. 

Come next year, I will no longer have a child in the school district and decisions made in the schools will no longer have a direct impact on my family. 

But it's still my school district.