Brummett nails the defenders of pitiful Paron. The inconvenience of long bus rides — or a long drive to Wal-Mart — is one of the tradeoffs of rural living.

Paron advocates say that perhaps local high school students who want courses not offered at Paron could be transported to Bryant for those classes. But they say that transportation to Bryant would be unfair if applied to the high school student body as a whole.

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In other words, this supposed unfairness should be extended only to kids uppity enough to invoke their full constitutional right to seek an educational opportunity beyond that of their schoolmates but equal to that offered elsewhere.

There remains this curious idea that a school has a right to exist and that a school’s mere existence is inherently virtuous. But there is only one inherently virtuous constitutional right in the public education equation. It belongs to the kid who wants as good an educational opportunity as the next.

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But … Brummett also predicts that Mike Beebe will be forced to join Asa Hutchinson in pandering to Paron in this, the latest rural school brush fire, before the campaign is over. Sigh.

PS — You did see where Ron Crawford, a leading cheerleader for preserving insufficient education in Paron, has given the max to the Hutchinson campaign. Is he paying the Friday firm legal bills? They don’t work cheap. Anything but full fare would look like an in-kind contribution to Asa as it’s playing.

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