It’s early for a palate cleanser but we need one after the last week of news. This one is extra refreshing because it involves a school board meeting where board members weren’t accosted by people threatening to harm them because they disagree with the district’s COVID policies.

Per the AP, more school officials are following the lead of election workers and quitting because they value their lives more than their jobs.

In Vail, Arizona, speakers at a recent meeting took turns blasting school board members over masks, vaccines and discussions of race in schools — even though the board had no plans to act on, or even discuss, any of those topics. “It’s my constitutional right to be as mean as I want to you guys,” one woman said…

Police have been called to intervene in places including Vail, where parents protesting a mask mandate pushed their way into a board room in April, and in Mesa County, Colorado, where Doug Levinson was among school board members escorted to their cars by officers who had been unable to de-escalate a raucous Aug. 17 meeting. “Why am I doing this?” Levinson asked himself.

Kurt Thigpen wrote in leaving the Washoe County, Nevada, school board that he considered suicide amid relentless bullying and threats led by people who didn’t live in the county, let alone have children in the schools. “I was constantly looking over my shoulder,” he wrote in July.

Three school board officials in one Wisconsin district resigned a few weeks ago, in part said one because he never knew if his car and its windshield would be in one piece after the crowd left following angry meetings. Most officials aren’t even paid. It’s volunteer work.

But don’t fret. There’s a crop of smart, sober people waiting in the wings to replace the ones who retire.

Anyway, this scene played out a few days ago in Virginia’s Henrico County and mercifully doesn’t involve anyone threatening to kill anyone. The punishment here is self-inflicted by board member Roscoe D. Cooper, who was handed a list of name of people purportedly waiting to speak and and dutifully called on every one of them. Evidently Cooper’s never seen an episode of “The Simpsons” — or heard the name “Phil McCracken,” which should have been his tip-off to stop reading.

Was no one else on the board familiar with this prank, in fact? How did Cooper make it all the way through “Eileen Dover” without a giggling colleague intervening?

Maybe they do all need to be replaced, if only due to basic lack of awareness.

Here’s the clip. Exit question: Is that Kyrsten Sinema at the beginning?

We all need this right now.
Kids pulled a Bart Simpson on the school board pic.twitter.com/M0OSSTgFlB

— Nicole Arbour (@NicoleArbour) August 31, 2021