2024-11-18

November 18, 2024

The November general meeting was held on November 12, 2024.  This meeting wrapped up before 10pm, with Baqir showing up hours late, just in time to pass the syllabus policy.

Agenda item 4: Approval of the agenda

The administration requested that we remove the assistant-principal recommendations from 11.01.  This ended up being a compromise position because Patton was doing his usual fuckery with employees he doesn't like.  You see, when a principal that he likes requests an employee, even if that employee didn't apply for the job and a different one got selected, then the process is bad and the principal should get what he wants.  But when a principal that he doesn't like requests an employee who made it through the hiring process and was the best employee selected, then surprise surprise the process is bad and the principal should not get what she wants.  As usual, his arguments were vague process arguments and insinuations about doing things differently than usual,  etc.  Hopefully the recent HR process work will demonstrate, without doubt, whether or not the process was correctly followed and these people can be hired.

Agenda Item 8.01: Student representative's report

A few of the kids in Daniel's high school are interested in running the library, possibly as a means to provide volunteer hours for the students who need them for various reasons.  This could be pretty cool.

Agenda Item 11.05 - Referendum date

Motion: No (carried: yes)

(Note that this item was moved up to much earlier in the meeting to coincide with the superintendent's report.)

The district had recommended a referendum date of February 25, 2025.  Moriak requested a later date, March 12, 2025, to allow for more time and better weather.  There are a bunch of timing requirements around referendum scheduling, and the February 25 date was designed to give the district a second chance in case the first one fails.  The March 12 date would push a second referendum a bit too late for our comfort if it failed.  However, the board discussed the possibility of simply putting in for two referendum dates, and then we would cancel the second if we passed the referendum the first time.

Moriak felt that going all-out would be the best way to pass a referendum, putting everything on the line for maximum pressure.  I felt that the best, safest motion would be to put in for both dates (the March date and the June backup date) if and only if asking for two dates is allowed, and falling back to the February date otherwise.  The board decided to to do the first part (without the fallback), with myself and Lou voting against it.

Fortunately, it turned out that we could ask for multiple dates at the same time, so we will have our March and June dates.

Agenda Item 11.01: Administrative recommendations

Motion: Yes (carried: yes)

People don't listen 🙄

So, this whole thing came down to one carefully crafted motion back in item 4 (approval of the agenda), plus a minor misunderstanding of the attachments on the agenda, plus Patton not paying attention to what happened in item 4.

So, here's what you need to know:

1. This item had two recommendations: one for contract renewals, and one for two assistant principals.

2. As I mentioned earlier, we removed the assistant principal part of this item.

3. This left the contract renewal part on the agenda.

4. But!  The agenda item came with three attachments.  Moriak specifically removed the third subitem, but there were only two subitems.  Attachment 1 corresponded to the first subitem, and both attachments 2 and 3 corresponded to the second subitem.  So, basically, removing the second attachment was the same as removing the third (one was public; one was private).

5. Patton wasn't paying attention to what the motion was and what the agenda item was, so he didn't understand what Moriak had done.  In his defense, his printed version of the agenda was older and had separate items for these two things.  But the one online and the one that was on the screens during the meeting were this version, where 11.01 had two subitems.

6. We argued for a while until everyone understood all of these facts, and then we approved the contract renewals.

On the topic of contract renewals, there were a few non-renewals in there, and a couple performance plans, and this is a good sign to me of the new HR starting to take control and clean house.

Agenda Item 11.03: Policy review: Syllabus policy (second reading)

Motion: No (carried: yes)

This was the second reading of the syllabus policy, which means that after this passed, it became official district policy.

The syllabus policy is a solution in search of a problem.  It's basically Smith-Tucker saying that if the schools just sent home a little more paperwork, then communication would be so much better and everything would be great.  As far as I am aware, nobody has any problems figuring out what their kids are learning at school (asking them is a great way to start), and the district has a whole-ass curriculum that's public information.  One of the sticking points was the extra burden that this put on teachers (especially teachers of younger students) that required them to draft letters and send home information that really isn't all that important.  Apparently the district was able to negotiate (with Smith-Tucker) letting the district staff take care of some of that to spare the teachers of younger students (which kind of defeats the whole purpose, but there never was a purpose, so whatever).

Smith-Tucker continually asserted that the district wrote the updated version of the policy, which is technically true (the best kind of true 😉), but what that basically means is that Smith-Tucker wrote the policy, it sucked, and the district realized that it was going to get stuck with the policy no matter what (Patton faction wants it, Patton faction gets it), so they might as well make it suck less.  So yes, they technically wrote the updated version, but that doesn't mean that they want it.  At no point did the district advocate for the policy; rather, they answered yes/no questions about it.

Anyway, Baqir at some point showed up (he wasn't at executive session, nor was he at roll call either time, but he managed to show up in time to get this policy passed), and the policy is now official.