2025-05-06

May 6, 2025

The May general meeting was held on May 6, 2025.

Agenda Item 4: Approval of the Agenda

We got off to a late start, since we were in executive session until around 7:30pm.  We had someone at the meeting who was there for agenda item 11.04, so we moved that to be immediately after this item so they could go home.

Agenda Item 9: Changes to the Consent Agenda

There were no changes to make, but President Patton took a vote to do nothing, which passed, and took a vote to approve the consent agenda with no changes, which also passed.  Technically, he took a vote to approve the consent agenda, but then he thought that the vote was to not make any changes to the consent agenda, so then we voted again to approve the consent agenda.

The way that this is supposed to work is that any board member can pull any item out of the consent agenda, and any such item is then added as a separate item later in the meeting.  This way, the board can quickly pull out possibly-controversial items without a fight, and then we can approve the rest easily.  No votes are required or even appropriate under this item; changes are made by any member revoking consent of that item.

Agenda Item 11.04: Inter-Neighborhood Community Builders Tax Refund Request

Motion: Yes (carried: yes)

Inter-Neighborhood Community Builders got a tax exemption due to their charitable status on November 28, 2023.  However, they had paid school taxes on their property after that period, so we refunded them for their payments made after November 28, 2023.

Agenda Item 11.01: Superintendent's Contract

The short version of the story is that our lawyer told us that we hadn't given him any real parameters to work with in order to draft the new superintendent contract with Joyner.  We had told him to do it like recent ones in the state and with comparable pay to her experience, but that's about it.  In executive session, he recommended that we have a discussion in public about the items that we care about in the contract and direct him accordingly.

Instead, Patton just told everyone to e-mail Superintendent Andrzejewski their ideas and he'd send them to the lawyer.

The only thing that I'm really interested in is that we engage with AJ from Effective School Boards to ensure that our new contract has the best practices that they recommend built in, since we have the opportunity to do the contract correctly from the start.

Agenda Item 11.02: WLC Recommendations

Motion: No (carried: no)

I don't know if Patton falls apart as the night goes on, but this item got pretty bonkers.  As part of our MOU with the Wilmington Learning Collaborative, that group can make recommendations for, in this case, principals directly to the board; it does not have to go through district approval.  Last meeting, we had a whole parade of people come through and ask us not to replace their interim leadership just as things were starting to move forward.  This meeting, the WLC made their recommendations for the new principals at Bayard and Pritchett, but nobody from the WLC showed up, so the district carefully noted that they were making the recommendation on behalf of the WLC using the WLC's wording.

In executive session, the district was clear that it was not recommending the candidates; there were some outstanding concerns that had not been addressed sufficiently.  Anyway, that's the first question that I asked.  I wanted to make it clear that while the WLC was recommending the candidates, the district was not.  We spent the next 10 minutes or so arguing about whether or not it was "out of order" to ask the district for its opinion on the candidates that we were voting on for the district to hire as principals.  It's obviously both appropriate and in order, but Patton's brain appears to be frozen in time and locked on to key words or phrases.  This time, he latched onto the fact that the WLC recommended the candidates, and he didn't want to entertain anything except that, despite having the district HR representative at the podium to answer questions.  After it was clear that he simply could not grasp the situation, I said my piece.

Agenda Item 11.03: May Financial Position Report

Motion: Yes (carried: yes)

The district presented its May financial position report to the board.  We had discussed this previously at CBOC, and it was exactly as presented there.

Agenda Item 11.05: Hearing on Manley's Demand for Hearing

Motion: Yes (carried: no)

This should be my final school-board-related item related to Baqir's residency.  Last month, I sent a letter to the district demanding a hearing with regard to Baqir's residency (Baqir has been holed up in Pakistan for over 14 months and is clearly not residing in Delaware any longer).  The crux of my argument was that the district has a policy with regard to board member vacancies that states that the district should follow the law, and I argued that the district is not following the law if it refuses to send a vacancy notice to the Department of Elections.

As part of my strategy of exhausting every option to get this clown off the board, I gave the board the choice this meeting to hold a hearing for me or deny me.  They chose to deny me, which lets me appeal the matter to the Department of Education.  That appeal will be sent out this week.

Those in favor: Manley, Moriak, Trauth; those against: Lou, Patton, Smith-Tucker.

Agenda Item 11.06: Willis Towers RFP Discussion

I really don't have words to describe what happened here.  Patton brought up a thing, highlighted some words that he liked, made it sound important, and then started ranting on about me and Moriak, if I'm not mistaken.  I tried to pay attention because I like to laugh a little bit at our meetings, but he lost me quickly after accusing me (or the whole board?) of double-spending money? after he stayed silent to trick? the board into double-spending money? and there was supposed to be a report but he let us stumble into a trap because there wasn't one?  Dude's still big mad that he didn't get his way last meeting, and it shows.

Anyway, the thing here is that I requested the district review its HR processes to get a handle on wtf was going wrong over the past couple of years, and the district decided that an outside group should help with that, so they put out an RFP, and they selected Willis Towers.  Willis Towers then did a whole bunch of process mapping, which the CFO ultimately presented to the board at the beginning of the year.  Before that, back in August, I attempted to pause unnecessary spending and have the CFO use the preliminary results and his internal plans to craft an improved process, now that Willis Towers had completed their process mapping.  Patton requested that I not make it a motion, and the board instead punted it to CBOC and/or a workshop.  Obviously, Patton didn't follow through with a workshop, but we discussed it at CBOC.

Patton's the kind of guy who will use anything to jam you up when he wants to, and in this particular case, he tried to claim that the contract wasn't for the right kind of thing and that we didn't do the thing anyway, trying to make up some story about having to pay for the work to be done twice because it wasn't done correctly the first time.  Obviously that didn't happen, and like I said, I got lost in the rant, so I can't really say too much more other than that he's wrong, and if you feel like transcribing his rant and extracting a meaningful question from it, I'd be happy to comment on the particulars.

Agenda Item 13.01: WLC Report

A major bombshell at in the last 10 minutes!  Smith-Tucker announced that she hasn't been attending the WLC meetings since February and has decided to "resign" from the group.  We've know that she hasn't been showing up, but openly admitting it in her last 2 months on the board was a surprise move that I didn't see coming.  As Moriak pointed out, that's a dereliction of duty.  The WLC MOU is written in such a way that exactly one board member from Christina is part of the WLC, and that's the one from Nominating District A, the Wilmington district.  In this particular case, that's Smith-Tucker until June 30 when her term expires.  But she's not appointed to the WLC; she's there ex officio, so we can't replace her with another board member.  So she's just giving a big middle finger to both our board and the WLC and saying that she can't be bothered to do her job.  Her term can't end soon enough.  Good riddance.

Oh, and one more thing: to all the kids I spoke to tonight during honor roll (and you know who you are), you rock.  You're on the right side of history, and I'm proud of you.