If Loren Martell’s intention to stop reporting on our school board meetings holds up it will be especially good that we are beginning to broadcast them. I presume yesterday’s HR and Business Committee meeting will show up but I’m not sure more than a couple dozen folks will bother to watch whereas hundreds of folks or more would have read Loren’s column reporting them. His loss is all the more notable because our DNT Education reporter is making fewer and fewer of our committee meetings.
For reasons I cannot fully explain the two meetings have turned on their heads. When I was on the Board it was not unusual for the HR meeting which took place first to take ten minutes, fifthteen less often. Today a fortyfive minute discussion of personnel issues is not uncommon. Today there is only one item I have much interest in reporting on and that has to do with my coincidental meeting with a new employee who was on our new hire list. She’s works with Homeless children. More on that in the next post.
Here is a not terribly extensive list of what we covered yesterday.
We asked numerous questions about new hires, resignations, job reclassifications, leaves etc. There are about twelve such categories and the School Board has to sign off on them even though they generally are simple administrative actions. There was a brief discussion of how retiring Facilities Director Kerry Leider’s job will be divided up at his September retirement.
Our HR Director Tim Sworsky told us he would be providing “comparables” that Art Johnston had asked for last month comparing the compensation and duties of our Superintendent with those of other area superintendents. We have two months to tell the Superintendent whether we intend to ask him to stay on.
We talked about some new jobs we have created and Alanna Oswald had questions about the various pots of money from which we funded a new job to help minority students.
We asked quite a few questions about the request of one collection of our employees – integration specialists – who wish to break away from their current bargaining unit (union) and create their own.
The fact that our Board now focuses so long on what used to be overlooked and mundane internal work must sigify something. Perhaps its little more than some of us paying real close attention to questions affecting our employees.
As you can see none of these topics are hot enough to draw folks to our newly released videos.
I’m already bored writing this so I’ll only mention one of the topics we discussed in the following Business committee which was scheduled to start fifteen minues after HR started but which had to wait till closer than an hour to begin.
The principal areas of discusion involved proposed changes to our policy. This is sort of a big deal because the School Board OK’s the rules by which we operate. However, I was shocked when the Red Plan reared its bloody head to discover that Supt. Dixon all but ignored a hundred years of policy and the Board pretty much did whatever it wanted. In effect policy was whatever the Board wanted to do at any given time limited only by state statute. In the old days the Board took votes to suspend policies that interferred with whatever actions it want to take. I found that extremely capricious and cavilier.
For the past two years our Administration has been looking at a “model policy” book for school boards that has been set up by the MSBA (Minnesota School Board Association). Every meeting we get a handfull of them to consider. Our current policy book is about two inches wide so this will take a long time.
The biggest discussion, which I prolonged, had to do with our transport policies bussing kids from home to school. Among the things we considered was Alanna’s interest in making maps available easily to families for the transportation routes to and from schools. I raised at least two issues. I suggested that requiring families to drive their children to the language immersion classes at Lowell School was inequitable because poorer families would have a harder time ferrying their kids to and from Lowell. I also suggested that current language allowing the Superintendent to appoint a someone to the Traffic Hazzard Safety Committee be changed to give that authority to the School Board Chair and insure that the appointee be a school board member. I’ve been puzzled by any mention of that committee in the past three years. I served on the committee for three or four years in the 1990’s.
I also raised the question and Alanna added insight to the subject of getting the DTA to pick up schools after hours and help them with transportion to and from extra curricular activities. This was commonplace when I was formerly on the Board. Poor kids again are the ones who lose out. Alanna mentioned the case of ninth graders at Denfeld who have no way to get themselves to Lincoln Junior High for swim practice.
I don’t feel like proof reading this. Sorry. I have a lot of other things and some other posts to work on. Oh Loren. I’ll miss you.
