Notes From the September 24th Meeting

NOTE: If you want to watch the board meeting yourself, tune to Lower Providence's Community Channel (Comcast channel 28, FiOS channel 42) the Wednesday after the meeting at 6 PM, or that Friday and Sunday at 12 AM, 8 AM, or 6 PM. Or, here is their YouTube channel.

- First off, I want to apologize for the lateness of this post. It's a combination of working, not having the greatest time frame to write up this blog post, and my laptop screen being cracked, and is now on it's way back from Texas. On top of that, I have had issues with my Google account, which caused my last post (about the then-pending Teacher's CBA agreement) to disappear.

- If you watch the tape, you'd see the massive, massive threshold of people--students, parents, teachers, and taxpayers--and then if you skip to about thirty minutes later, they would be gone. Yup, it was the M Awards again; for the then-seventh and then-eighth graders achieving a 93% or above on their overall grade for that year. I don't have the list of names, but here's my congratulations to them.

- I'm glad that the Board was so generous to give us one whole freakin' week before deciding that the CBA agreement was "good for the community"and voting 8-1 on it (more about the "No" vote later). Seriously, the behavior of the Board as a whole, and the currently-leaving Superintendent is starting to cross the fuzzy line from "Being Ignorant" to "Corrupt" with the way this whole contract situation was handled. You know, if they haven't jumped over that line anyway. According to the various dates that Joyce was so kind to give out to us, there was a tentative agreement on the CBA in June before the budget was passed. And when the Board was asked how the contract would factor into the budget by a resident, they refused to answer.

I'm still mad about this situation. I actually got up and commented at the meeting last week in anger, which was the first time I ever did that. I don't really care if the contract was actually "good", because it's not like the Board actually tried to share it with anyone. The press release in The Times Herald had more figures in it than what was ever explained at either of the two meetings. So, we just watched the devolution of the Board, reverting into a state of North Korea-esque of talking about how good we're doing and not actually telling anyone anything at the Board meetings, instead just waiting for the soapbox in the local newspaper. Grand.

- After the contract was shoved through at breakneck speed passed, Phillips tried to pass some sort of resolution, committing the Board to a zero-percent tax increase for the next budget, which the effort of which is good. However, I doubt Phillips actually planned out what he wanted to do, because the resolution floundered and flopped for thirty minutes (it felt like) in New Business, before the Board killed it off with an 1-8 vote against it. The resolution anyway would have been symbolic at best, not condemning the Board to any requirement to stick with it, so not only was that amount of time wasted, it would have done diddly when voted through.

- The second item in new business was the sudden and surprise resignation of Mr. Howard Jones. He was the only dissenter in the teachers' contract, citing the problem with the Step program (and from what I heard, he had a problem with it the first time around) that could leave almost half of the teachers in MSD receiving a nice payout from reaching the top step. The rest of the Board was either ignorant to the problem, or just don't care either way, and all voted for it. Jones must have known it, too, because he gave a typed copy of his resignation to each of the Board members, and after the vote (Jones voted for himself!), he left the room (not "minutes after" the vote, like The Times Herald erroneously reports). Now his seat sits empty for a whole two months before the Board fills it with one of the candidates who is a shoe-in to win the election.