You might think that kind of public participation at a board meeting would be seen as a good thing. But apparently it wasn’t good enough for some people. Today, some people have criticized the many people—including at least one steering committee member—who left the meeting after two and a half hours, because they did not stay until the board’s discussion was over. Never mind that most of these people have small children, that many had not yet eaten dinner, and that the meetings are played (and frequently replayed) on television. This was apparently an egregious violation of decorum.
One board member—who was not physically present at the meeting, but participated by phone, and who was doubtful about his ability to attend the next meeting—wrote on social media:
the credibility and weight I give to speakers who then leave and do not listen to the discussion is severely diminished. In particular, speakers who pose several questions then leave and not hear the answers or discussion of issues related to the question. While schedules are obviously an issue, I would hope folks would recognize and plan that this was going to be one of the longer meetings because of the issues presented. While I’m not complaining as I know what I got myself into, all told, our meetings yesterday lasted from 5 pm to 11 pm.What sanctimonious baloney. One can only assume that the people who did not attend the meeting at all rank even lower than those who attended but left after almost three hours. What a convenient excuse for disregarding what 99.99% of the public has to say.
I never cease to be amazed at how readily people who attend public meetings assert a special right to greater say over the (normal) people who don’t. I certainly hope those people never complain about Congress. Meanwhile, maybe we could arrange for members of the public to phone their comments in from long-distance?
If we needed a demonstration of the Bubble that I referred to in my comment, we didn’t have to wait very long.
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20 comments:
okay, I thought I posted my comment on this post but I must have posted it on the "bubble" post. but I wanted to add, was it necessary to profusely thank the BLDD consultants who we PAID?
I'm not defending Jeff's comment, but to continue our discussion from the Patch, I think that you're misunderstanding my complaint. Its very good that people showed up in defense of their schools. But an informed defense is a better armed defense. Your post about the Diversity Policy and school closings hinges on at least one misunderstanding that the discussion after community comment last night would have corrected. I'm not lecturing anyone's manners, I'm trying to keep you from muddying the waters on a cause that we largely agree on.
What misunderstanding?
Just a slight correction, since fine-point pedantry is what I do: we paid the BLDD consultants, but most of the thanks were for the volunteer committee who contributed a lot of their time. I think that's appropriate. Agreed that it could have been shortened a little.
This is a major issue of my campaign: valuing public input, and soliciting a wider range of it.
We cannot define "involved parent" as someone who attends meetings. Any parent who wakes up in the morning, sends a child to school, peeks in the backpack at the end of the day, feeds, and loves their child is an "involved parent." Their perspective is just as important as the parent who miraculously never misses a PTO or board meeting.
I agree there was some great discussion after most people left the meeting last night. I challenge the board and the district to find ways to have these conversations in other public forums, so they are easily accessed by people who could not attend or needed to leave early.
Your misunderstanding that the Diversity Policy played a large role in the deliberations of the Committee that proposed the scenarios that include school closings. One of the Board members, (I think Sarah Swisher? Not sure) asked what role, if any, the Diversity Policy played in the Committee's discussions. The answer was, not much, that Committee members knew it would play a role in deciding what recomendations to take or leave, so it got only perfunctory consideration in their recomendations.
There were some other helpful/hopeful points made that might have diffused some fo the anger growing around this issue or made people better armed to press it forward, but that was the specific context that I made my complaint in.
I argued that the Diversity Policy played only a minimal role in the Comittee's crafting of scenarios, contra your post from a few days ago on the Patch blog. If you'd stayed last night you would have heard that same question asked and answered in the negative. There were other helpful/hopeful points made for peopole who what to keep schools open and are concerned with the actual facts of who is propsing that they close and why. Listening to the people you're speaking out to is a good practical, tactical choice, not a matter of politeness.
Phone in comments? Please. That is so 20th Century.
How about an official Twitter backchannel displayed at the meeting and included in the broadcast?
Maybe someone with a MindMixer account could suggest it. . . .
Eric -- Where did I ever say that the diversity policy "played a large role" in school closings? I *asked* whether it was causing school closings, and, as I said repeatedly in the comments, I recognize that there are certainly multiple causes to the school closing proposal. I continue to think that the policy has made the closures more likely, because it has made people more ready to accept the need for three big new elementary schools, which in turn leads to cost-based proposals to close existing schools. As far as I can tell, you haven't disagreed with that. Moreover, the mere fact that a board or committee members denies that it played a role is not conclusive evidence that it didn't, given the natural reluctance of supporters of the policy to admit that it might have.
But if your point is just that people should be informed, I don't disagree. I wish you would acknowledge that there are many ways of keeping informed other than staying past 9:00 at the meeting. Also, I believe that many people were under the reasonable impression that the board's discussion had already occurred before the public comment period, and that they had agreed to continue the discussion in their later work session.
Sara -- Thanks for the comment. I agree.
I agree that it would be great to find other, more easily accessible avenues of connecting with people. To the board's credit, though, there have been listening posts, and the board does make the recordings of their meetings very accessible on TV to people who don't attend. In the past (for example, here), I was able to find the broadcasts online as well, though I'm having trouble finding them now. Anyone know the link?
Eric -- By the way, I do recognize that your point was about strategy, not politeness. If I am overreacting at all, it is only because I have grown used to hearing the refrain of: people who don't attend board meetings (or jump through some other hoop) have no right to complain. That (which you didn't say) is just an exclusionary tactic dressed up as an argument. Personally, I think even people who don't vote, or who aren't even citizens, have a right to speak up about what a public entity does.
Karen -- Lol. How about everybody gets a clicker?
Hi, Chris,
Thank you for the blog and all the useful information. Your arguments against closing Hoover Elementary are quite persuasive and I agree that Hoover should not be on the top of the list for school closures. One general point that I would like to discuss involves public opinion. If decisions are to be based solely on public input, it is doubtful that any school would ever be closed, replaced, or that attendance areas would ever be redrawn; even though these are things that periodically do need to happen (although not necessarily now or often). Over the short term, people fundamentally want things to remain the same and wish to delay the tough decisions. But the job of the school board is to do what is best for the long term of the district. I guess the dilemma is how to value public input, but still make unpopular, necessary decisions.
Infuriating. Nevermind those who were actually *working at a job* during the school board meeting (like me), or single parents who couldn't leave little ones home alone, etc., etc. For the record, only one of the school board members replied to the email I sent to all of them regarding the closure of schools.
I suppose sometimes it might be necessary to adopt a paternalistic approach when the general public doesn't understand all of the nuances of an issue...Like a benevolent dictator maybe. But wasn't the purpose of the steering committee public input meetings precisely to discuss the nuances? If the paternalistic approach is rooted in nonsense rather than facts, it is a rubbish approach. I guess we may have to come to terms with the idea that the public input sessions were just a show to make it look like they give a crap.
I think a 6-hour School Board meeting violates the Geneva Conventions.
I agree with commenter Val321. "Schools would never be closed on if based on public opinion." I think all the school district is trying to do is save money and make all the facilities around the same size with equal amenities. What is wrong with that idea?The community has voiced their opinion for new schools especially on the east side, how do people think this was going to happen without closing a school and then redistricting? I find it naïve that folks didn't see this coming.
Val321 and iclocal -- Thanks for commenting!
As I wrote more about here, I don't see how we can talk about "what's best for the district" without regard to what the community itself wants for its schools. The decision about whether to close older neighborhood schools for the sake of building larger schools elsewhere is one that requires a value judgment; there is no objective "right answer." Especially given the lengths the school board went to solicit public input, I don't see how it's justified to say that the community's value judgment on that question is wrong and that the school board should substitute a different one. If it isn't ultimately the community's values that prevail, then whose values do?
I don't entirely agree that the public could never be persuaded to close an existing school. If the case is genuinely convincing, I think they could be, but the case for these particular closings really isn't that strong. The steering committee and the consultants did everything they could to make the case for them at the community workshops, and still people didn't agree. I do think people value their neighborhood schools highly and would need a pretty convincing case to be persuaded to close one of them. The great divergence in opinion between the steering committee and the community workshops seems to reflect a different valuation of preserving existing schools.
I do disagree about one thing: where is the evidence that the community voiced its opinion for three big new elementary schools? Not only were the capacity determinations and enrollment projections presented essentially as objective facts (they aren't), but was the public ever presented with a scenario that did not propose three new elementaries?
M. Samuelson -- Thanks for commenting! I do wonder why more board members don't send at least perfunctory acknowledgements of the emails they receive. Sometimes it feels like you're just dropping your comments down a well. (I did receive brief responses from Sally Hoelscher and Sarah Swisher.)
It does seem hard not to wonder whether the community workshops were just for show. So much of the scenarios were presented as a fait accompli. Why not ask if we wanted three big new schools? If the committee was going to present a scenario to the board that closed only Hoover, why was such a scenario never presented at any of the community workshops? And even despite the consultants' emphasis on their (very questionable) "educational adequacy" and "cost benefit ratio" calculations, which inevitably devalued older schools, the public still opposed closing older schools. If the committee was going to forward only scenarios that closed schools, why bother asking over and over again?
FedUpMom -- Lol.
Mandy -- Not only did we pay the consultants, we gave them two votes on the committee! Who should be thanking whom?
Video of the July 9th school board meeting is now available on the ICCSD website.
https://www.cdtdigital.com/iccsd/items/item_detail.php?type=video&id=993
It runs 3:23:48 and community comments on the steering committee recommendations start at about 1:39:30.
Note to the ICCSD webmaster: it would make more sense for the videos to be arranged by year rather than by month with, you know, the newest videos at the top of the list.
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