Irony of Ironies

Today’s story in the Trib picked up on a great irony. Yesterday’s Business Committee meeting was a modicum of earnest business like discussion. So much so that three very unusual actors were rub a dub dubbing together in their tub. The Trib:

“Board members at their Monday business committee meeting again touched on reinstating the seventh period at both middle and high school levels. The high schools lost that period more than a decade ago, and the middle schools in 2012. That reinstatement is not recommended by district administration, but board Chairwoman Judy Seliga-Punyko and members Harry Welty and Art Johnston all voiced support for adding to the middle schools or both.”

The whole discussion of the seventh hour is worthy of deep consideration. Losing it set us on the slippery slope of shucking off so much of our once vaunted music program. Today Denfeld music teachers bemoan the fact that without it in the middle school very few students come prepared for their programs and they’ve ended their chamber orchestra as a result at a time when educators are coming to value the intellectual power of music as it applies to so much else throughout the curriculum.

I suggested that we drop the program we approved to make the closed lunch hours more palatable at a savings of $360,000 (half the cost of seventh hour in the middle schools) and seek a memorandum of understanding with the teachers to get them to accept contract changes that would further the seventh hour. Supt. Gronseth favored restructuring the school week so that classes could be taught four days a week but rotate through the month and year. I suggested that we should target the high schools in an attempt to dissuade so many Edison families into pushing for a new Edison High School. Would that we were not embroiled in a School Board Civil war to distract us.

What the Trib did not report was the mini drama of legal summonses being handed out to five of the school board members during the meeting. I saw Bill Westholm take a brief look at his quarter inch packet before setting it aside. A lawyer he knew what he had been given. There was hardly a rustle as they were handed out that I could detect but then again I was engrossed in one of the agenda items.

Art had hoped that the District would hand the packets out quietly but his attorneys reported that the District’s lawyers would not answer their request to pass the summonses on to the District. Having a courier deliver them from the Twin Cities will be one more $500 expense for the District to swallow if the Federal Courts order that the District pay Member Johnston’s court costs to defend himself.

Evidently only Chair Seliga-Punyko objected to accepting and signing the two summonses given her, one for herself and one for the District. She pushed them away at first an act of denial that may be understandable. She had expected that Art would be gone by January. Instead its now March and the hearing that would precede a vote to remove Art won’t take place until May just as the school board races are getting started. And if the Federal Courts take the case it could be years until such a hearing takes place. I can imagine a school board campaign where candidates pledge to stop the legal proceedings against Art to end the drain on the District’s budget and attention. If a majority got elected determined to pay attention the District’s needs instead of the current board’s egos we could put the Schools out of a great deal of misery.

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