Recommendation Regarding Public Forum

There is an item on the agenda for next Wednesday's board meeting. It is called recommendations regarding public forum. You must link to it from the board agenda. APS does not make it possible for me to provide a link for you.

If you read it, you will find that after due consideration by the Policy committee; they cannot decide whether it is better to deny people the right to ask questions on the record; before the meeting or after the meeting. An experiment has been proposed; the public forum will be off the record for a while after the meetings.

At that point a determination will be made whether it is better to ignore the right to petition elected officials, before or after meetings.

From the minutes; it looks like Paula Maes and Modral; are trying to slip in language that limits the right to speak, to only items on the agenda. If the board doesn’t place an issue on the agenda, not only will people not be allowed to ask questions on the record, they will not be allowed to ask questions at all, if the board won't put them on the agenda.

Can you imagine Paula Maes putting this question on the agenda, so that it can be asked?

How much money do you and Modral make every year; litigating for aps leaderhip, evasion from accountability even to the law?

Voting unanimously in favor of continuing to keep the forum off of the agenda, and limiting comments only to issues on the agenda, were ,Paula Maes and her loyalists; Robert Lucero and Delores Griego. You will remember Robert Lucero as the board member who tabled the motion that would have required him, and APS leadership, to answer legitimate questions on the record. Mary Lee’s constituents will be disappointed to learn the she voted along with Maes and Modral as well.

On the Administrative side; this new policy is the brain child of Beth Everitt, Nelinda Venegas, Susie Peck, Rigo Chavez, Bill Moffatt, Brad Winters, DeeDee Stroud, and Andie Trybus.

It appears that the senior administration also looks forward to the time that not only will they not have to take questions on the record; they will not have to take questions in public at all; without their preapproval.

There is no justification to move the public forum off the public record; and to limit the scope of questions; except to evade accountability for corruption and incompetence as public servants.

If there were any justification at all, they would offer it; they would defend themselves.

Continuing shame on the yet to be indentified, decision makers at the Journal and the Trib, who will not investigate or report upon an egregious betrayal of the public trust by the leadership of the public schools.