2026-05-13

May 13, 2026

The May general meeting was held on May 13, 2026.

Lauren Sawin officially joined the board at the end of the meeting.

All motions carried unanimously.

Agenda Item 4: Approval of the agenda

During executive session, we were informed of some student-transcript-related things that were troublesome (more details to come once the investigation is complete).

I amended the agenda to add another action item around student transcripts so that we could direct the district to do an audit before certification.

Agenda Item 10.05: Student transcripts

As I mentioned earlier, we were made aware of some issues with student transcripts, and while the district was already working to get everything addressed, I wanted to make sure that the board issued a directive to the district to get an audit done before the seniors' transcripts were certified.

Agenda Item 10.01: Board vacancy, district G

Over the weekend, Donald Patton resigned (finally).  Lauren Sawin ran unopposed in his nominating district, so basically as of mid-March, she was practically board member elect for that seat.  Since Patton resigned, I made a motion to appoint Sawin to his seat effective immediately, and at the end of the meeting, she was sworn in.

(Yes, there's some process fuckery around requirements for the board to interview candidates and make an appointment, but Sawin was already elected by the people for that specific seat, and postponing her appointment for a couple of months to do needless process stuff would be a disservice to the people of the district.  The people chose her; the seat was open; we put her in the seat.)

Agenda Item 10.03: Use of ELA funds

Long story short: in 2020, there was a referendum that had a very specific wording around how its funds could be used (for a specific curriculum).  However, the specific curriculum spending for that was wrapped up within a year or so, but the line on the property tax bill remained.  So every year, we would raise around $2.7M for a specific thing that was already done.  If we did nothing, at the end of this year, we would have around $10M sitting around doing nothing, money that we taxed people to get, but money that we wouldn't spend.

The district had historically read "curriculum" to mean a very technical, inside-baseball thing (the purchase of the new English Language Arts curriculum itself and the training of the teachers to use it), whereas I (and probably most of you) would read "curriculum" as "whatever we're teaching to these kids", including the books, materials, training, and instruction in that curriculum.

We discussed this thoroughly at CBOC the previous month, and the recommendation there was to request that the board direct the district to actually use that money for curriculum-related things, including instruction.

I made the motion on behalf of CBOC to allow the district to use that money for curriculum and instruction, retroactive to the beginning of the year.

Once that passed, I made the motion to extend that guidance forward indefinitely.