Sunday, November 30, 2014

APS Board pulling a fast one

There is state law on the posting of agendas for public meetings.  It is the APS Board of Education's preference and practice to post their meeting agendas at the last possible minute.  As often as not, the deadline is missed.  Such is the case with the next two meetings of the board; a Policy Committee Meeting on Tuesday and a regular board meeting on Wednesday.

Neither agenda was posted in time to meet the Open Meetings Act deadline.  Further, posting the agenda includes posting links to the records they will be discussing and acting upon.  Those links are not up still.  There is no way for you to get to any information at all on an agenda item that shows up very late in both agendas.

In the Policy Committee Meeting agenda, link, it shows up as

Consideration of Approval of Revisions to GB12 Employees as Duly Appointed or Elected Officials (Discussion/Action)
Presenter: Carrie Robin Brunder - Director of Government Affairs and Policy
How much more cryptic could a description possibly be?
Is their goal to inform interest and stakeholders of the
subject of their decision making or the opposite?

Twenty-four hours later, the regular School Board Meeting agenda, link, indicates that the board intends to approve of their work of the night before.
Approval of Revisions to GB12 Employees as Duly Appointed or Elected Officials
They appear to be changing the terms of their public in-servitude in secret from the community members they serve.

The terms of public in-servitude are the prerogative of the people, not of their servants.

The last time they did something like this, it was to remove the role modeling clause from their own standards of conduct;
In no case, shall the standards of conduct for an adult, be lower than the standards of conduct for students.
This is all conjecture of course, based on my extensive personal experience and efforts to get the leadership of the APS to role model honest accountability to meaningful standards of conduct, in particular, the standards of conduct they establish and enforce upon students, and based on the difficulty I have found in trying to hold these people accountable to any standards of conduct at all, even the law; the standards of conduct that every higher standards, are higher than.

Conjecture is made necessary as well, by the abject lack of any records at all of what it is that they intend to do.

The following is one of the first photographs Mark Bralley took
of me; taken in fact,before we knew each other.  I am behaving
lawfully during a public meeting and, about to be ejected.

Bralley used the photograph in a post he wrote in 2007, link,
about what he witnessed at the Policy Committee Meeting. 

The board did not want to talk about role modeling then,
any more than they want to talk about role modeling now.
Five years later, in some of the latest photographs taken
by Bralley, not much has changed.

People holding up posters, peacefully, quietly, respectfully.

Minutes later, APS Chief of Police Tellez gives us the APS thumb.
I would be willing to bet, whatever it is they are intending to do, it will make them harder to hold honestly and actually accountable for their public service.




photos Mark Bralley

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