Kelly McBride-Reedy does a great job summarizing the meeting in her Community Press article.
Short version:
Community comments challenging the the accuracy and completeness of the 9/29/09 meeting notes. The Board is pursuing a revisionist history approach, omitting from the notes their opinion that supplemental material should be evaluated by a range of criteria that includes the degree to which material could cause controversy among community groups.
A group of community members read brief statements for inclusion in the 10/26 notes to clarify the 9/29 notes. The Board shortly thereafter voted unanimously to accept the 9/29 notes as correct without regard to community input.
Community comments during the 10/26 meeting also reminded the district of their own conclusions from the neighborhood school study which concluded it is the quality of the teachers, not the buildings that determines the quality of the educational system. She urged the district to stop prioritizing a new, as yet unapproved middle school construction project ahead of paying the teachers an “average” salary in comparison to other Hamilton County districts.
What Kelly left out of the article was that Carrie McCarthy, a WHS social studies teacher, was invited to the meeting to share a curriculum proposal she developed for a Human Rights class. It was absolutely AWESOME and made several of us in the audience wish that we could go back to high school just to take that class.
Having now attended several School Board meetings, I have to confess they’re a lot like watching actors on a stage where everyone has a script. The only interaction with the community is when someone’s name is called by the President off the public comment sign up sheet. You get up and it’s like talking to statues – no interaction, no eye contact, no notes, no nothing. And then you’re done. The next name gets called and so it goes.
Then they get on with their agenda, easily ignoring the fact that there are 30-40 other people sitting in the room watching the show. They reference handouts, policies, and programs in code – if you don’t have a copy, you have no idea what they’re talking about. In one exchange regarding a policy, one board member said “I have a question about the second paragraph on page 2″…everyone shuffles the paper and someone says “I think that’s clarified on at the end of the page continuing or page 3″. Everyone agrees and they move on…with the audience just sitting there going “hmmmm???” but nobody knows what just happened. They talk quietly, making it really hard to hear what’s going on and only interact with the audience when they think it’s necessary to call for “order” in the room if someone makes the error of reacting to something they just heard from the stage. The Board only interacts with individuals they have invited to be part of the conversation. Without that invitation, we just get to tap on the glass wall between the community and the board to see if there’s any reaction on the other side.
I’ve never been on a school board but I’ve spent a lot of time in meetings with large, sometimes very large groups. I suspect it is a skill to be able to conduct business like this and so completely and effectively ignore a room full of people.
Unfortunately, our Board has become so skilled at ignoring the “uninvited” public in board meetings that it has become the standard of care when it comes to every interaction with the community. Incumbency creates arrogance and arrogance becomes the overwhelming message communicated to anyone in the community that fails to appropriately “kiss the ring” when entering into any dealing with the administration and/or Board.