Seems the board attorney is recommending, going forward, that questions from the public will only be answered after the public portion of the meetings. Apparently, it's meant to be an efficient use of time.
Really?!? Mr. Shi should of stepped in and said No - that's not something we want to do to the people we represent. You know, the residents and taxpayers - the only stakeholder who continuously gets ignored and who are the ones who pay for some 90% of those $251 million Bloated Pots of Money they call School Budgets.
But he didn't!
Now, remember Mr. Shi was the one who took the unprecedented action as Board President before in blocking all public comment before they voted to approve the change in insurance brokers. A very dangerous precedent that he appears to have not given up on with this latest version of how and when the board will engage in dialogue with the people they represent.
Not for nothing but this is so wrong on many different levels and I shared my thoughts on this with the board. It shouldn't be the purpose of the board to avoid dialogue with the public, especially since they only have one meeting a month and there aren't that many people who rise questions or make comments at the meetings.
Seems to me that they already have a six-minute rule and the public can ask their questions or make their comments and have them responded to and a chance at rebuttal before they leave the microphone.
Why change that if it's not the board's way of avoiding a dialogue with the public?
It's a very bad way to treat the public and just Not Nice - you never want to cut-off the public from engaging in dialogue with the board or to take away the publics right to respond to comments from the board about questions they took the time to ask.
Who would want to do something like that to the people they're supposed to represent?
Sure seems like this guy does:
If you reading this, then you should be concerned about what's going on here. You should reach out to the board and make sure something like this doesn't happen.
Here's the August 27, 2018 meeting where this came up. Kudos to Elizabeth Conway for questioning this proposed change in the rules for pubic comments:
Anyhoo, when is the rest of the board going to Step-Up and recognize that this isn't the type of leadership this board needs to move the district forward in a positive and productive way? We already have an Oligarchy going on over on the other side of town - we don't need another one.
They are not going to step up and this was the decision of Jerry to change that portion of the meeting. This is wrong and just ugly. The saddest part is that he has board members that support him on this.
ReplyDeleteWell, let's hope he has no support on this change but we'll know when this comes up at the next board meeting at the end of September. Hard to believe that any board member would want to be an enabler to Mr. Shi's attempt to shut down dialogue with the public and dismantle transparency. But, like I say, we'll see.
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