Columbus School for Girls

Tip O'Neill is credited with the aphorism "All politics is local." What makes that kind of strange (for a partisan political blogger) is that local issues don't fall as cleanly along ideological lines as many federal issues do. The story doesn't write itself. The story is, however, often more engaging. Eighty people apparently showed up at the Bexley City Council meeting the other night to air their views on the CSG expansion plan.

If we extrapolated, that's like 4740 Columbus residents showing up at a city council meeting.

The CSG is a valued part of the Bexley Community. I have a daughter. Part of the reason I live in Bexley is because Bexley has some of the best public schools in the country. I believe in, and strongly support, public education. Even so, I've looked up the tuition and wondered if there was a way to swing it. Every dad wants the world for his little girl, and, perhaps bizarrely, that place has always struck me as a training ground for world domination.

Most of the folks showed up at the meeting to support the school's request to knock down a house that sits on school property to make room for new facilities. Some folks favor preservation, and oppose anything that would lead to more traffic. Everybody agrees that they want the CSG to stay at its current site.

So why is the CSG playing hardball? You've got to love these non-denial denials:

David Bishoff, who also lives on Columbia, addressed concerns from some council members that the school would leave Bexley if the plan is rejected.

"They’re not moving," Bishoff said. "We don’t need to be afraid of that."

Diane Cooper, the head of the school, said school officials are focused on the plan, not on the possibility of moving if things don’t work out.

"We have recently been approached to move the school to another location," Cooper said. "However, at this time, we are focused on achieving our goals here in Bexley."

So, the head Unicorn is saying that they aren't planning to move if they don't get their way. They are planning on getting their way.

That's an awfully big hammer to be swinging around.