May 23rd Meeting -- Public Comment (or Speak When Spoken To)

I’ve been writing this one for several days, now. It's long, and I'm sure it's clunky, but it does express my reaction to the Public Comment portion of the May 23 Board meeting.

A little background: one of the reasons, maybe the biggest reason, this website and group were started was that I had received several comments from people in the community, that told me, in one way or another, that many residents felt excluded and out-of-touch with what was happening in the school district. It wasn’t that they didn’t care; they were more than willing to discuss their opinions on various issues. It was that information was often difficult to come by, with individuals having to scour minutes of past board meetings, which is difficult to do, and appear at board meetings in person to address the members of the board and have someone listen to your concerns. If you don’t have access to the meeting minutes, if you are not able to attend board meetings, even due to work or family obligations, then you are not able to participate in the process. Even if you are able to attend meetings, you find that many issues are raised, discussed by the board, and voted upon without any time for the residents to voice opinion or concern. Those who do attend and speak at the meeting, in the Public Comment portion of the meeting, at the very beginning of the meeting, are often made to feel as though the issues and concerns they raise are theirs alone, that their issue couldn’t possibly be of benefit to anyone else in the school district. In short, I was hearing from people who felt disconnected from the district and from the board members elected to serve them.

This website, and it’s e-mail group, was started to help better facilitate communication within the district. The more people have access to information, the more people discuss their concerns and the concerns of their neighbors, the better we can participate in the decisions the school board needs to make, the better we can understand those with whom we disagree, the more we will feel invested in the school district, and the more we will participate. When we discuss these concerns with our neighbors, when we accept that we all have the same basic goals of making our district strong and secure, when we listen to other points-of-view in that context, we find new and creative solutions. It’s a better conversation when all who want an avenue for expression have one. So, one of the things we instituted was the idea that we would ask a question or raise a comment for anyone who wants us to. Then, we would post the response from the board.

I write this entire prologue, because I think it is important to the question I asked at the May 23 meeting and the response I got from the board. Normally, I try to write the question, and post the response with as little opinion from me as possible. I want the reader to make up his or her own mind, so I try to leave my commentary to whatever discussion comes forth in the e-mail group.

This time, I can’t. My feelings are too strong. If you disagree with any of what I write, fine; great! Please, share your thoughts! But this time, I’m adding my commentary here as well. A lot of it. Fair warning....

The question that came in was how to find the board members’ e-mail addresses. It’s such a great question, I wish I’d thought of it myself. But I wanted to be fair; some people don’t like e-mail, or don’t use it at all. So I left the question more open-ended: How would board members prefer to be contacted, and where would constituents find that contact information?

Maybe the answer shouldn’t have been unexpected; but it shocked me, nonetheless.

Board President Paula Zasadil said that she would like people to work through teachers and administrators, then appear at a Board Meeting to address the Board in the Public Comment portion of the meeting.

That’s it.

We, as constituents, as the people who elected the board members to be our representatives to the school district, are not to contact board members individually or collectively to ask questions or voice opinions on anything to do with the school district, unless we are all at a board meeting, and the board has given us our allotted time.

By the way, that allotted time? Five minutes.

Do not call, do not write, do not e-mail members of the board outside of a board meeting; that’s the way the board members want to hear from you.

“For what purpose?” wondered Board Member Bob Nunamaker. He said that board members don’t have any individual authority; so contacting board members outside the meeting wouldn’t be very successful, in his opinion.

Now, if someone were expecting a decision or action RightNowThisMinute, then Bob has a point. If, as I suspect is more often the case, someone wanted to have a board member listen to their concerns, if someone in the district were unable to attend the monthly board meetings, then Bob is wrong; Board members don’t need any individual authority to listen to people. In fact, as elected representatives, they have a responsibility to listen to the people they represent.

If you wanted to have an issue added to the meeting agenda, forget it; it’s nearly impossible. According to this response, if you wanted your elected representatives to add an issue to the Board Meeting Agenda, you would have to attend the meeting and make your request at the meeting. Of course, the agenda is set before the meeting, so your item won’t be added to the current agenda. From the responses I’ve seen in the past year of attending board meetings, it’s not likely your issue will be added to next month’s agenda, either.

The response the Board gave to Tim Kassel when he made just such a request at the May 23 meeting (see his posts in the e-mail group – I’ll post it on the news blog as well), is sadly, typical. When he appeared at last month’s meeting, his requests to further investigate whether or not some children are being left behind academically, despite the good test scores within District 3, was met largely with test score statistics and defensiveness by the administration that we have great teachers, a point that was made repeatedly, even though all agreed with it, and it was decidedly off-topic. When Mr. Kassel came before the Board at this month’s meeting to further discuss different ways to analyze the test score data, and requested that a study of the data be added to a meeting agenda, he was told that the issue was really just his issue, not one that concerns the whole district, and besides, the board has been discussing this in the last several meetings. Really? When? I have been attending these meetings for a year now, and I don’t recall any such discussion at a Board Meeting.

When Mr. Kassel made individual requests to get more data from the test scores, he was first told that such a request would violate the Freedom of Information Act, then he was informed that releasing such data would expose the district to possible lawsuits for violating privacy, even when the data contain no identifying information.

At that point, I wondered how the test score data are currently aggregated. Given the response above, how is anyone able to analyze the data at all?

When I interviewed for the open board seat this year, Supt. John Hill talked to me about this website. He told me that, if I was appointed, the website would have to come down. I thought that, if I were appointed to the seat, my contributions to this website would most likely change, and I’d hoped that others would be able to add content from the public point-of-view, since my perspective would be changed. But, John said that my contributions not be possible, since I express my opinion from time-to-time (though, I suspect, not as often as he thinks), and that an opinion I expressed would be the Board’s opinion, and that can’t be without the entire Board expressing the same opinion. So, I wouldn’t be able to express an opinion about issues in the district.

I cannot think of another government body that conducts itself in this manner. Have you ever written to a Congressman or Senator, at either the State or Federal level? Do they have a phone number you can call, an e-mail or physical address to which you can write? Were the phone numbers and addresses published, so that you could find them? Did you get a response, or did you get a request to attend a meeting of the Legislature?

I have written to my Congressman, Rep. Donald Manzullo, and to my Senators, Sen. Dick Durbin and Sen. Peter Fitzgerald. (I haven’t had the occasion to write to Sen. Barack Obama yet, but I’m sure I will at some point.) In each case, my elected representatives responded to my letter, phone call, or e-mail, addressed my issues, and, in some cases, took action on my behalf, all without my having to attend a meeting in Washington, D.C. How is it that these representatives can publish contact information, listen to my concerns, and respond; yet District 3 Board representatives cannot? The answer escapes me.