The beginning of my letter to the editor after the reporters failed to respond to my information for a news article: At the close of the May 13th Board Meeting, Board Member Kevin Clark proposed changes to Board Policy that would eliminate all avenues currently open to the public for two-way communication. In policy BED-R, the proposal was made to eliminate the public’s ability to submit questions for the agenda, the Board’s ability to add to the Agenda during the meeting and the ability of the Board President to recognize speakers at the meeting. Further restrictions on wording were also proposed. You can see the exchange during the last five minutes of the Board Meeting: stillwaterschools/SchoolBoard/MeetingReplays We were told that this would “eliminate the three paragraphs that don’t directly deal with our typical public comments and participation that we’ve done for years and years”. So it seems that this move was brought about because a group of concerned citizens used this forgotten policy to ask questions and now the status quo has been upset. We were also told that “it’s not typical of how School Boards function.” So I did some research. For comparison I used the Board Policies for School Districts which Mr. Barnard used to justify his athletic stipend increase and added other Districts that were even larger than ours to see how they handled the problem with many more patrons in their Districts. I summarized my findings in a letter emailed to all five school Board Members. Of the 13 school policies I was able to review, 100% of them allow Public Comments, 69% of them allow for dialogue with the Public during the meetings, 92% of them have a method for the Public to place items on the agenda and 30% of them even allow the Board to request input from the audience at their discretion. So contrary to Mr. Clarks statement, it IS typical for School Boards to get reasonable input directly from the Public. All evidence points to a successful District inviting participation and opening up as many avenues for communication as possible. In fact, the National School Board Association says, “The imperative for school boards is to develop ways of engaging, not only parents and community members, but also business leaders, political leaders and media representatives.”
Posted on: Fri, 06 Jun 2014 02:01:53 +0000
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