Building Community Polite Formalities Invite Indifference
After one term on the Spokane School Board, Nancy Fike will step down at the end of the year. But she has issued her colleagues this challenge: Make it worth people’s time to attend school board meetings.
Fike is distressed that regular board meetings, even special public forums held in neighborhood schools, are poorly attended by those in whose interest the school board functions. Is it the people’s own fault if they abdicate their responsibility? Partly. But what are they missing? The Spokane School Board traditionally works decisions out before its regular meetings, then formalizes them while the public looks on.
Absent is any substantive discussion of the diverse views that have been shared, the alternatives that have been considered, the trade-offs that have been made to achieve consensus.
A couple of weeks ago, the board adopted its annual budget at a regular public meeting. That meeting began late because board members were still upstairs in a work session, raising and answering budget questions that didn’t get aired at the regular board meeting.
On Wednesday, the board’s noon meeting will be preceded by a 90-minute work session. One topic for discussion will be a policy governing when to hold students back from middle or high school if they haven’t mastered certain skills.
If the public wants to know what concerns school board members have about that accountability measure, the work session probably will be a better place to find out than the regular meeting. If the board wants to follow up on Fike’s recommendation, a good place to start would be to make school board meetings a place where patrons can gain understanding of the issues facing their schools.
Board member Rocco Treppiedi has said he’d rather do more, rather than less, board work before the regular meetings. He doesn’t think the public likes a lot of debate. If Treppiedi is correct, and if the board uses that rationale to abandon Fike’s suggestion, then both public and board will have contributed to a further erosion of self-government.
Four years ago, the National Commission for the Renewal of American Democracy declared in its first report: “We must begin to build in America a culture of participation that embraces the value of citizen participation in the political process and that includes the diverse voices that comprise our nation.”
School boards, no less than legislatures and city councils, have a duty to help build that culture of participation.
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