Last night the SDUHSD Board of Trustees met for a regularly scheduled Board Meeting.
The headline summary of the meeting: NOT MUCH HAPPENED.
There were some interesting points in the meeting, but mostly "inside baseball", with some undercurrents of controversy yet to be completely understood, but for a regularly scheduled Board Meeting that lasted over five hours, it wasn't super productive.
Back-to-School
We remain on-track to submit an application with the State of California that, if approved, would allow us to continue with our school reopening plans. If approved, we could start to bring students back to school as early as March 8th.
There have been numerous meetings across the District where parents and students can ask questions of the administration on the details of how the back-to-school plan will work. Many questions have been addressed, including the format of the in-class teaching model. Bryan Marcus showed a video of what can be done in the classroom, which was generally well received.
Facilitron Software Program
There was a lot of discussion at the meeting about renewing a software program called "Facilitron", which is used to help manage the rental of District facilities. The issue was whether or not the District should renew the contract on a month-to-month basis or renew for 12 months. There was a whole lot of time spent on what seems to be a trivial item, which signals to me that there is more to this than meets the eye. Sure enough, that is the case here.
The big picture is this. As a public entity, the School District must make its assets available for others to rent. For example, a sports club may want to rent a field for a game. A non-profit might want to rent a school parking lot for a fundraiser. A for-profit company might want to rent an auditorium for a lecture or a business meeting. The District must make these assets available, under regulated prices.
The controversy is over who should manage these rentals. Some want the Foundations to manage this process, others feel it should be managed by the District administration. Trustee Gibson and I are on the infrastructure committee, and we will be meeting in March to start a deep-dive to understand the various issues. More to come on this.
By the way, the District approved the one-year extension of the contract, even though we could have gone month-to-month for no additional cost. That doesn't seem to make sense to me, so I voted no. The motion passed 3-2 to sign a one-year extension.
Sublease of the Boys and Girls Club
The School District leases a building the District owns to the Boys and Girls Club under a long-term lease. Part of the building is not used during different times of the day, and the Boys and Girls Club has found a tenant to sublease that space. This is a win-win situation - the Boys and Girls Club earns some much-needed funding from the sublease rental income, and the subleasing tenant can get the space they need. All good.
The issue for the Boys and Girls club is that they need the landlord's approval (our SDUHSD District) to enter into a sublease. This won't affect the District's lease with the Boys and Girls Club - they are still on the hook for the lease payments and all of the other terms and conditions of the lease.
So why would the District not approve the sublease? I suppose it might depend on who the sublessor would be. If it were a strip club ... well that might bring some bad publicity. We might not want to approve a marijuana dispensary as a sublessor either.
The problem is that the potential sublessor is an elementary charter school. Apparently, some people feel that facilitating a charter school, in ANY way, is just not what the district should do.
The pros of subleasing would be:
- it would bring in important revenue to the Boys and Girls Club
- the school would be a feeder for some families into our District middle schools
- it would help our local economy
- it would facilitate an improved education for these children.
In the end the board did what it does best ... asked for more information and deferred a decision. This should be on the agenda for the March Board meeting. I'll know more once I've seen the contract.
Public Comment Protocol
Superintendent Haley and Board President Muir discussed Board Protocol for accepting public comments. It was concluded and agreed that:
- The Board will continue to accept requests to speak on agenda items that are potentially to be acted on by the Board, at every Board meeting. No speaking requests will be considered for informational-only items on a Board agenda.
- The Board will also continue to accept requests to speak on non-agenda items that are within the District's purview at all regularly scheduled Board Meetings.
- The Board will allow up to 2 minutes per speaker, and up to 10 speakers on any item. This can be changed at any time at the discretion of the Board President.
- If more that 10 people wish to speak, a random number generator will be used to determine who will be allowed to publicly speak.
- The public can always submit written comments via email to any Board Member or member of staff, although those comments will not necessarily be read at the Board meeting.
- All comments on agenda items must be related to that specific agenda item. If a speaker is off-topic, they risk being cut-off at the discretion of the Board President. The limitation on public comments at regular meetings during the Non-Agenda items public comment period is that the comments need to be generally germane to school board business, and not be more appropriately positioned for an item on the current Board agenda.
- All of the above has been reviewed by legal representatives and is consistent with all laws and regulations, and it is not out of the norm when compared to other school districts.
Interestingly, some people have started a public relations campaign that involves civil rights organizations that don't understand the law. There may be stories about this published in the coming days.
District Social Media Pages
A Facebook Group called Families for Students First consists of generally, though not exclusively, like-minded people who advocated for the safe and quick reopening of our schools; and other school issues of interest. The administrators of the Group have the right and ability to pretty much do what they want. They can erase comments or ban people from joining because they don't like them, because they don't like their fashion sense, because they don't like their haircuts, because they mention the word MERV, or because they don't want to open schools. That is up to the Administrators of the Group. To be clear, I am not an administrator or moderator of this Group, and I myself have had some of my comments (just this week) censored and removed. I'll get over it.
Dr. Haley had a confidential legal memorandum created and delivered to the Board (not for free by the way) that describes why this Facebook Group can exist and behave as it does. Although that memo cannot be released due to attorney-client confidentiality legal issues, Dr. Haley discussed the highlights, including the following:
- This Group is a private Group managed by private individuals and can pretty much ban and censor whomever it wants. An analogy I've been using is that it is as if someone created a Chess Club, only to have Haters want to join so they can say "Chess sucks, you guys should play checkers." I'm sorry, but if you feel that way maybe you should create a checkers club. As such, this group can continue to "viewpoint discriminate" as you wish.
- Having said that, there is a new law in California that extends the Brown Act (that covers public meetings) to specifically cover social media. Essentially it says that if one member of our Board (say me as an example) were to comment on a Facebook Group something about school business (for example, "I'm in favor of having a swimming pool"), then a second Trustee is not allowed to comment, and cannot even click on the "like" button to give it a "Thumbs Up". Is this law constitutional? No, but it is the law until the court strikes it down.
By the way, I was so happy to hear one of this Group's members compliment this Group for providing information of value.
Athletics
The last item I will mention is athletics. There was a brief discussion about athletic trainers and the possibility of an athletic director, but no formal action was taken. A committee will look into the various issues and report back to the Board.
That is about it. Fingers crossed that we will be starting to expand our reopening soon!