South Butler School Board member George Zacherl has kept on the nice-guys’ path so far in his dispute over how the board conducts its business. So far that path hasn’t taken Zacherl or anyone else any closer to the destination of an improved South Butler school district.

On Monday, Zacherl proposed amending board policy to allow board members onto the meeting agenda to discuss pertinent topics. He also recommended that members be given more time and liberty for discussion at the meetings.

Zacherl made the recommendations, he said, in response to a presentation last March by solicitor Tom Breth regarding the district’s costs for various provisions on the table during protracted teacher contract negotiations.

Zacherl said he was not given a copy of the presentation data before the March meeting and had no chance to research the numbers himself. Neither was he given opportunity to refute the presentation at the March or April meeting, Zacherl said.

The board’s president and vice president, Matthew Cimbala and Donna Eakin, reject Zacherl’s claim that they’re attempting to silence his voice of dissent.

“We’re all here to do the best we can for the students, teachers and staff and quite frankly I’m quite tired of hearing, ‘I’m a minority,’” Eakin said. “It hurts me that you feel you have to position yourself like that.”

The reality is that Zacherl represents a sizable minority of South Butler voters and taxpayers, a representation made manifest in the four years the teachers continued working under an expired contract. The prolonged stalemate hinted that a board in lock-step with the administration and its solicitor might not be the healthiest thing. Sometimes is this type of circumstance, it’s the dissenting voice that leads us back to the more reasonable path.

A bedrock principle of democratic thought can be summed up this way: A truth that sets you free will always offend you the first time you hear it. Anyone who ever followed a 12-step recovery program like Alchoholics Anonymous can attest that freedom came when they first admitted they were powerless to overcome their addiction on their own — that’s a liberating truth.

And what’s a liberating truth for South Butler? Maybe Zacherl knows one. Maybe not. The greater worry is that the rest of the board and administration has stopped searching for it — it might offend them.

Left untended, these issues take on lives of their own. The district’s ultimate authority — the voter — is deceptively prone to organization and mobilization when they catch on to a liberating truth. A water contamination incident two years ago in the neighboring Butler district comes to mind.

Maybe it’s easier to remain on the current path than it would be to risk the irritation of blazing a potentially more productive one. But there’s no guarantee the old path is any safer.