August 16, 2006

Remember when government was “By the people, For the people.” Well it seems this doesn’t apply to our school board. The other night at the school board meeting we were reminded how disjointed and out of touch our current school board is. A gentleman had signed up to talk to the school board but was cut off during his 3 minutes because his topic was not related to any issue on the agenda.

For those of you who don’t know you are only allowed to address the board about an item on the meeting agenda. For the record to get something on the agenda you have to submit it ten days in advance to the Superintendent who can approve adding your topic to the agenda. Off the record the Superintendent can add it to the agenda under new business if it is less than ten days to the board meeting. But don’t count on that happening.

So where are we going with this? What a wonderful example our board is setting for the students of our district when the five people elected to represent the patrons of the district won’t allow the same patrons the chance to talk. Does this bother anybody else but us? For those who don’t know, each individual board gets to set the rules and guidelines during their term. These five board members could change the rules and use an inviting style of governing gathering input from the patrons. Apparently they like the secretive cloak and dagger style.

It might not be so bad if they were consistent and just followed the rules they set. For example, they chose not to get involved with the local county commissioner election for fear of retribution by the potential winner of the election. Then a board member sang the praises of the county (which infers the county commissioner) at the last board meeting. We guess the fear of retribution isn’t there anymore or it is another example of the board talking out of both sides of their mouths.

Hopefully after the elections we will get a new board member who will remember the patrons who voted them onto the board. Also remember it might take a couple of elections to get enough people on the board who still care about the patrons. We keep our fingers crossed.

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