2025-11-18

November 18, 2025

The November general meeting was held on November 18, 2025.  The meeting was uneventful and straightforward.  All motions were passed unanimously.

Troncoso attended remotely for some reason.

Agenda Item 9.01: Effective School Boards Update

Our Effective School Boards coach, Rodney Jordan, joined us to provide an update.  Basically, the board is currently conducting "listening sessions", which will continue through January or so.  Once those are completed, the board will craft true long-term goals for the superintendent.  In the meantime, the superintendent will be presenting her interim goals for the short-term goal that we assigned her last month at the next board meeting.

Agenda Item 9.02: Board Vacancy Update

We had two applicants for Baqir's old seat.  The state Commission on Elections is working to ensure that they are legally qualified to hold the office.  Once that's done, we'll conduct public interviews for them.  The plan is to have First State Educate or the League of Women Voters actually host a town-hall-style forum like they normally do for candidates, and based on that, we'll vote to appoint one of them.  Assuming schedules line up nicely, we'll conduct the public interviews on December 8 (special meeting), vote to appoint one of them on December 9 (regular meeting), and swear in the new member on December 10 (special 2-minute swearing-in meeting right before CBOC).

I strongly support having First State Educate or the League of Women Voters conduct the interviews as a public, town-hall-style forum.  These groups already do such a service for the community during normal elections, with First State Educate focusing on school board elections.  Christina School Board would create the questions, but First State Educate would handle the operation of the meeting (just like they normally would).  This way, we, as board members, would be in the audience just like everyone else.  We would have no impact on the forum once it started, and we would have no way to influence any of the candidates.  We would be true observers, without our thumbs on the scales.