Will Richland 2 Board demand answers?

The next School Board meeting will be the day before teachers go on holiday and waste their day parading around the State Capitol, hoping to influence legislators to throw a few bones their way.

How will Richland 2 be affected?

Chester County has already decided to cancel school on May 1. Wow!

According to The State newspaper this morning, Richland 2 "... is not considering closing schools"

According to the governor's mouthpiece, the governor “believes that teachers leaving their classrooms sends the wrong message to students, unnecessarily disrupts schools, and inconveniences their students’ working parents.” 

Maybe he should send the State Police to the capitol grounds to arrest teachers? Of course, that won't happen. But where should this have been stopped? At the school level. When a teacher asked for a personal day (on a day when thousands claim they will protest), the principal should have denied the request. If the teacher said last week that she is going to be sick on May 1, tell her to bring a note from her doctor on May 2.

The Governor is right, but he needs to put some teeth in his message. 
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The School Board should make a clear, strong statement to teachers - "The mob does not control the schools." Review the Policy on personal days of leave. If it doesn't already state that a Principal will consider all factors, including impact on the students for the day when considering a request for personal leave, it should!

The Board should direct the superintendent to report on April 30 how many teachers are expected to be absent from their classrooms on May 1, and then he should report on May 14 how many teachers did not report to work on May 1.

Coming up on 4/30/19. Another marathon.

The next Regular school board meeting for Richland 2 will be Tuesday, April 30, 2019, at 5:00PM. Note the time!

The Regular, open session will begin at 5:00PM with a 30-minute Budget Update. Then the Board will run for cover in the Executive Session for an hour and then return to open session at 6:30PM.

A skeptical person might ask, "Why don't they just have the Budget Update at 6:30PM? You know, when parents can be there to hear the whole thing." Place your answers in the Comment section below.

Under Item 10 on the Agenda for April 30 the trustees will be asked to vote on revisions to 32 board policies. How many? THIRTY-TWO. This is absurd. Hopefully, at least one of the trustees will protest the impossible situation in which they are being placed by the board chair and the superintendent, who put their heads together to construct the Agenda.

And then they will be asked to consider nine more policies, two reports and the Capital Improvement Update.

I hope EMS will be standing by. The board members will need oxygen and other medical care after such an ordeal. If four board members pass out from over-exertion, there won't be a quorum. Will Grubhub deliver to R2i2?

It's way past time for this Board to hire a consultant to train the board chair how to run a meeting. As they are, meetings just run on and on, ad nauseum. There appears to be no commitment to conduct the board meetings expeditiously and within a pre-determined time-frame. Remember the phrase - Work expands to fill the time available? Good ol' Parkinson's Law? This Board would do well to set a specific time, such as a maximum of 90 minutes, and then focus on completing the meeting "within the time allotted."

Without an ending time, one of the days the Board will end up being there all night.