APS School Board must reconsider 24 year old resolution

no debt is to old for an honest man to pay. unk

Is a sitting school board bound by a previous board's resolution? 
If not, then for how long is their word good? 
Is it even good on the night they make their resolution;
is it any good at all? 

If we really want students to grow into adults who embrace character and courage and honor, someone is going to have to show them what those look like.

• 24 years and 19 days ago, the Albuquerque Public Schools Board of Education promised to show students what character and courage and honor look like.  They adopted high standards of conduct for students and then promised them adult role models worthy of emulation.
• And then, they reneged on their promise.
• And now, they refuse to acknowledge that they reneging on their promise.

There are double standards of conduct in the APS.

According to the board’s Student Handbook;

Students are expected, to model and promote honest accountability to a nationally recognized, accepted and respected code of ethical conduct.

Board members and senior administrators, by means of their cost-is-no-object litigation and legal weaselry, are arguably unaccountable even to the law; the lowest standards of conduct acceptable to civilized human beings.

The double standards and egregious hypocrisy can be resolved one of two ways;

1. The board can lower student standards of conduct to the point where board members are finally are willing to be held actually accountable as role models of accountability to the same standards of conduct that they establish and enforce upon students. Or,

2. The board can raise their own standards of conduct to the level of the standards they establish and enforce upon students. The board can restore the role modeling clause to their own standards of conduct; the one that used to read;

in no case shall the standards of conduct for an adult be lower than the standards of conduct for students.

What the board can not do, is to continue to ignore the petition.

Continuing to stonewall the petition is dishonest.

Stonewalling is among the most cowardly forms of dishonesty. It is unworthy of the senior-most role models for nearly 80,000 of this community’s sons and daughters in public schools.

The board's own Dr. No;
no public discussion of ethics
standards, accountability and role
modeling.  Not now, not ever.

The board must over come the more than decade long obstruction of School Board President David Peercy.  He has kept open and honest public discussion of ethics, standards and accountability off the table of his Policy Committee for more than a decade.  He has refused to discuss, in public and on the record, whether the role modeling clause should be restored to the board's own standards of conduct.

Four other board members must then, summon the character and courage to place the 1994 Character Counts! Resolution on the table in an open public meeting; there to reaffirm, amend or rescind it, in public and on the record.

It is time; it is well past time for the board to declare candidly, forthrightly and honestly, what it is that the board intends to do about the double standards of conduct in the Albuquerque Public Schools and their abject failure as role models of student standards of conduct.



photo Mark Bralley