On March 30, 2022 the SDUHSD held a Special Board Meeting at the District Office. It was the first meeting held in-person in two years.
The Board Agenda consisted almost entirely of re-voting on every item that was passed from the last three Board meetings. Essentially this meeting was a do-over of those prior meetings. Why did we feel a need for this “do-over”?
As many of you may know, the District is being sued over the map adjustment process for determining new Trustee Areas, a task we must complete by law as a result of the 2020 census. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit claim that the map we chose is illegal. It is not. That case should be decided by June.
Last week the legal complaint was amended to include an assertion that the last three Board Meetings were not properly noticed to the public, and therefore none of the actions taken were valid. Why were the meetings potentially not properly noticed?
In February the District decided to adopt a software platform called “BoardDocs” to organize Board Meeting Agendas. This is a popular program known as an “integrated agenda management platform” and is used by thousands of school districts and city governments around the country.
California law requires that if a school district uses an integrated agenda management platform to display board agendas, that agenda must be accessible from the homepage of the district’s website via a direct link. When someone clicks on the direct link, the link shall “take the person directly to an Internet Web site with the agendas” of the district, and although “the integrated agenda management platform may contain prior agendas … the current agenda of the school district shall be the first agenda available at the top of the integrated agenda management platform.”
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are apparently claiming that this didn’t happen. I don’t know the details, but to be extra-cautious and not risk losing a lawsuit over a technicality, the District decided to redo the votes from three meetings all over again.
Everything passed in the prior meetings was passed again. The entire meeting was pretty much perfunctory. Given that, you might think that the meeting was a snooze-fest.
You would be wrong.
A group of people decided that since the Board was going to re-vote on these already-decided items, they would take that opportunity to try to get some of the Trustees to change their minds on some key votes, particularly the vote on the new Trustee Area maps. They chose to disrupt the meeting by talking over Trustees, dance and wave their arms in the audience while Trustees were talking, make personal attacks during the public comment section, and otherwise behave horribly. As Trustee Melisse Mossy was explaining why she supported a particular new Trustee Map, Mr. Duncan Brown, the head of the teachers union, put his index finger to his head and mocked shooting himself in the head. Those around him laughed and smiled. I’ll remind everyone that Mr. Brown is a middle school counselor.
To be clear, not everyone who attended the meeting behaved poorly. Some spoke politely as they made their case for one course of action versus an alternative decision. But make no mistake about it, the big story about the March 30th meeting was the concerted effort and deliberate strategy by members in the audience to be rude, provocative, and disruptive.
I sincerely hope that we can now put some of this negativity behind us and focus on how we make our schools better for our kids. There are numerous areas we can focus on. Improving LCC, making SDA a boundary school, building pools, making ISPE more inclusive, and so much more. To make progress, we need to work together. Wednesday night was not a good start.