In the Journal this morning, link, a report that the leadership of the APS is trying to get a law passed that will keep the names of candidates for APS Superintendent secret from stake and interest holders.
They argue that it will create a larger candidate pool.
Those additional candidates will have additional one characteristic in common; they don’t have the character and courage to tell their employer the truth about their intentions.
The APS board of education wants to add more candidates who are comfortable joining them in hiding the truth from stake and interest holders.
Under the law, the board has a range of options regarding candor, forthrightness and honesty with stake holders. The range runs from “all of the truth that the law will allow” to “only the truth that the law absolutely requires” after all the litigation and legal weaselry that the law will allow.
The board has adopted standards of conduct for students. They don’t want to talk about them anymore because they are “higher” standards of conduct than those to which the board will hold itself accountable.
That the board spends millions of dollars from the operational fund on cost-is-no-object legal defenses for school board members and senior administrators renders them arguably unaccountable even to the law; the lowest standards of conduct acceptable to civilized human beings.
According to the standards of conduct that the board established and the superintendent enforces upon students; one develops and maintains their own good character by consistently requiring from them self “more than the law requires and less than the law allows.”
The Albuquerque Public Schools is at a fork in the road.
“Any and every thing that the law will allow” or something else.
The Albuquerque Public Schools Board of Education once passed a resolution. In that resolution they adopted higher standards of conduct for students; a nationally recognized, accepted and respected code of ethics. In that resolution, they promised to provide adult role models for students to emulate.
At the time, the board’s own standards of conduct held a role modeling clause. It read; in no case shall the standards of conduct for an adult be lower than the standards of conduct for students.
In response to efforts to enforce that clause, they voted unanimously to strike it.
They abdicated en masse, abandoning their duty as the senior most role models in the district in order to escape accountability to higher standards of conduct than the law.
The 1994 resolution is still binding. It has been neither amended nor rescinded. Solemn promises do not have a shelf life.
Do we want the 80,000 of this community’s sons and daughters in APS schools to grow into adults who believe that it is alright to do anything they can get away with ”legally”?
Do we want students to grow into adults who embrace character and courage and honor?
We will teach them by our example.
"Don't worry that children never listen to you;
worry that they are always watching you." Robert Fulghum
“The proper time to influence the character of a child
is about a hundred years before he is born.” Ralph Inge
The example of the board and their lawyers is neither courageous nor honorable. It does not demonstrate good character. It does not show students what it looks like to do “more than the law requires and less than the law allows”.
School Board President David Peercy and the board refuse to put the resolution on the table for reconsideration; amendment, rescission, or re-commitment. The do not want to discuss in public, their abandonment of honest to God accountability to higher standards of conduct than the law.
And they are getting away with it.
They are getting away with it because there are not enough people showing up at the supt search community meetings and standing up for honest accountability to meaningful standards of conduct and competence within public service in the APS.
And they are getting away with it of course,
because the Journal is keeping it all a big secret.
No comments:
Post a Comment