“Honesty” to be deleted from APS student standards of conduct

The Albuquerque Public Schools will meet tomorrow. They intend to delete “the Pillars of Character Counts!” from student standards of conduct.

Whatever standards they remove from student standards of conduct, they remove from their own.

They are after all, the senior-most role models in the entire school district; at least for the time being.

They recently refused to add “role model” to the desirable characteristics of their next superintendent. They refuse to discuss in public and on the record, their ongoing unanimous refusal to replace a role modeling clause in 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.

The specific language they intend to remove from students and their own standards of conduct reads in significant part;

Honesty
There is no more fundamental ethical value than honesty. We associate honesty with people of honor, and we admire and rely on those who are honest. But honesty is a broader concept than many may realize. It involves both communications and conduct.

Honesty in communications is expressing the truth as best we know it and not conveying it in a way likely to mislead or deceive. There are three dimensions:

Truthfulness. Truthfulness is presenting the facts to the best of our knowledge. Intent is the crucial distinction between truthfulness and truth itself. Being wrong is not the same thing as lying, although honest mistakes can still damage trust insofar as they may show sloppy judgment.

Sincerity. Sincerity is genuineness, being without trickery or duplicity. It precludes all acts, including half-truths, out-of-context statements, and even silence, that are intended to create beliefs or leave impressions that are untrue or misleading.

Candor. In relationships involving legitimate expectations of trust, honesty may also require candor, forthrightness and frankness, imposing the obligation to volunteer information that another person needs to know.

It is impossible to read those words and not comprehend that removing them from student standards of conduct, lowers student standards of conduct.

Lowering student standards of conduct lowers by logical extension, the standards of conduct of their adult role models.

School Board President David Peercy’s claim that he and other board members are accountable to “even higher standards” than the ones he intends to remove is a bald-faced lie.

Were there any such standards, he could, would and should point to them. And then to the due processes by which he and other school board members can be held honestly accountable to them.

David Peercy has deliberately, with malice and forethought, keep public discussion of the role modeling clause off of school board meeting agendas for as long as he has been on the board.