Laura Wagner: In fee fight, the bus stops here
Laura Wagner may be a Girl Scout leader, but all her ''heroes are troublemakers."
As the 39-year-old Marlborough woman sees it, ''People don't use the word muckraker enough anymore."
Wagner made trouble of her own last summer when the School Committee, desperate to make ends meet, decided at the last minute to impose fees for kids who take the bus. That meant an extra $500 a year for Wagner, whose children are 11, 13, and 15.
''It's money I certainly didn't have -- that I couldn't come up with in a week. And I know we're in a lot better position than a lot of people," she said.
When Wagner started making calls, writing letters, and showing up at meetings, she helped set off a chain reaction that would ultimately shake up City Hall.
At first, officials ignored her or seemed resigned that bus fees were the only way to handle the budget shortfall. So Wagner took to the Internet and asked other parents to join a boycott and picket City Hall. More than 50 parents -- mostly mothers -- showed up.
Sometimes she stood alone at city intersections holding a homemade ''Boycott the Fees" sign. She urged other parents to keep calling the mayor's office to protest. Dozens of them did.
''She's a fighter," said Beth Bartlett, a fellow mother and Girl Scout troop leader. ''There were times when my morale was low and I couldn't believe we were trying to do this . . . and she didn't want to give up on any of it."
Wagner has always had an activist bent -- and a sense of fearlessness. As a teenager, she dropped out of high school in Waltham. She later returned to school, earning her GED and a bachelor's degree in business by attending night school.
She and her husband, a contracts manager for an aerospace contractor, moved to Marlborough in 1992. The two are active members of the First Parish Church of Stow and Acton, a Unitarian Universalist church in Stow.
For years, Wagner stayed at home with her children, running a day-care operation and occasionally working as a substitute teacher. She went to PTO meetings, but said they bored her. She said she wanted to talk about issues like gender discrimination while the group wanted to talk about landscaping.
''It was all, 'When are we going to plant tulips?,'" she said.
She started paying attention to School Committee meetings, watching them on local cable, or sometimes in person.
Then the bus fees bomb was dropped.
With parents' rage mounting and a preliminary election less than two months away, Dennis Hunt -- who as mayor is also School Committee chairman -- appealed to the City Council to allocate an extra $200,000 to avert them. He had abstained from voting on the fees as a School Committee member. The council refused.
The next day Councilor Nancy Stevens, citing the bus fees as another example of the mayor's poor budget planning, announced she was challenging Hunt for the city's top job.
Next month, Stevens will become Marlborough's first female mayor after having defeated Hunt in November by 476 votes.
And the bus fees? The School Committee eventually managed to scrape together enough money to rescind them.
These days, Wagner is studying for a master's degree in social work. Her next project is to get city officials to donate space and funding for a Marlborough youth center.
School department officials have warned of bus fees in 2006-2007. Wagner said fighting the fees again would be ''exhausting" -- but she won't rule it out. Maybe ''this time around there will be enough people ticked off and at least asking questions," she said. 