During the couple of years that I followed the happenings in the Urbana School District, I kept marveling at the success rate of the administration. With one notable exception, they invariably got what they wanted. Want to hire a bozo principal? sure, why not. Fire him, not two years in, for encroaching on the boss’ turf? done. Reappoint the Superintendent doing all that hiring and firing without any public input? check. And so on.
There is, basically, one fundamental reason, why all this can happen. And many factors responsible for how it does happen. Some of them we discussed many times, – stonewalling, intimidation, administrative strong-arming, the usual tools of any administration as arrogant and inept as USD116’s.
But there is one more factor that I discovered only recently, and which, in my view, plays an outsized role in the unraveling of the district’s governance.
Theoretically, the check on a bad school district administration is provided by the district’s Board of Education. I, like many people here, did my fair share of appeals to that august body, never being able to figure out what arguments could get through. You tell them what’s going on, submit some data, do some reasonings, and – …nothing. But why?
I imagined the Board members getting together, discussing briefly my (or other disruptors’ ) missives, and deciding that they make no sense. Sure, I thought, I’ll accept that, just tell us where our thinking is wrong? Start a dialogue, perhaps we’ll understand each other?
Never happened.
Only recently I finally realized, why. Turns out, the members of the USD116 Board of Education just do not discuss anything.
It might sound crazy: after all, that’s what you imagine elected bodies do: they discuss and deliberate, right?
Wrong.
And it’s not because they are intellectually lazy, or don’t know how to express themselves1We really do not have enough evidence to judge.. It’s because of the one-two punch of a) being legally prohibited to talk among themselves outside of the Board meetings, and b) having absolutely no time to do so during the meetings.
The first jab is by the Open Meeting Act of Illinois.
This is a crazy piece of statute. It defines a meeting as any conversation dealing with pertinent matters between a majority of a public body’s quorum. In case of USD116, this means that conversation involving more than two members of the Board is automatically a meeting that needs to be public and announced in advance.
Say three Board members meet at a cookout, and start discussing those loonies fighting Critical Race Theory? Educational matters, majority of the quorum present, needs to stop right away. You cannot have three of the Board members on an email thread about anything related to education2True! happened to me. because responding to this thread with an emoji constitutes an unannounced and thus illegal meeting of the Board.
Whatever justifications the creators of that crazy law3Some other states, – say, Pennsylvania, – have far more reasonable laws governing official meetings. might have had, its only tangible result is not the prevention of collusion in that cigar smoke filled backroom. It’s the kneecapping of the Board’s agency.
Which is made complete by the second hard blow, the saturation of the Board’s agenda by pablum. The Board meets twice a month, and in principle, it could discuss in depth the district’s gravest problems. There could be a meaningful dialogue with the public. And that would endanger the commanding position of the administration, which never allows this to happen.
To prevent the Board’s discussions, the administration fills the agenda4Why the administration sets the agenda in the first place, by the way? to the gills with the dullest stuff. Most of the “discussions” of any pressing issue consist overwhelmingly of members of the administration reading aloud dumbed down, deliberately confusing presentations. When there are no presentations from the administration, vendors come and advertise their services. Other innovations are created, like the occasional urge to parallel translate some speeches, or the introduction of Student Ambassadors.
Altogether, there is no chance whatsoever for the Board members to actually discuss anything. Only the administration created agenda is allowed into the bimonthly meetings conducted under the watchful eye of the Superintendent.
Given that, of course the Board is meek and useless. Of course they behave as in trance, devoid of agency and clue. They have no platform to actually engage into what the collective bodies are there for, – taking in information and deliberating on it. They also have no platform where they can talk to the parents or kids.
To be fair to the Board, this impotence is largely self-imposed, – they did it to themselves. Allowing the administration to set the agenda and to control how the meetings are conducted, it’s on them. Even the Open Meetings Act isn’t that potent: the worst punishment the law stipulates is to invalidate any decision made at an unannounced meeting (sure thing, do not do that), or to force publishing the minutes (do this). Nobody will go to jail, or pay a penny for getting together one sunny Friday evening together at Riggs, and listening to the parents.
And yet, the Board is just content with the passive, gaslighted state the administration consigns it to. And why shouldn’t they be? We just reelect them, term in and term out, and then keep reading our statements at the Board meetings, those useless missives they will never be able, – or willing, – to discuss, be they about the dual language program, or the fate of Wiley, or the pervasive Urbana High bullying.
Some participatory democracy we got here, in Urbana, ladies and gentlemen. View to behold.