45 Policies to be Approved - Absurd!

The absurdity continues.

Tomorrow night the school board will be asked by the superintendent to approve 45 (FORTY-FIVE) Board Policies  Presumably these are all revisions to Board Policies, although the Agenda does not so state. Of course, this isn't solely the fault of the superintendent, because both the Board Chair and he created the agenda late last week.

Jamming 45 Policies into one meeting almost guarantees a lack of quality attention by the board members.

Let's say that each board member spent just five minutes carefully considering each revision. 45 x 5 = 225 minutes (almost four hours). Won't some of them be bleary-eyed or begin to skim, rather than read closely? Will some of them even bother to read any of them at all?

That whole revision project looks to me like a make-work project. The next thing they will be doing is going through each and every Policy to make it genderless.

I recall a neighbor who worked for the Federal Government telling me in 1972 that her job consisted of reading government documents and changing every "he" to "he or she" and every "him" to "him or her". And for that she earned $35,000/year (1972 dollars)  I remember thinking that I should have been a government employee!

If she is still there, now she's probably now changing every "him or her" to the (grammatically incorrect) "they". This is now how newspaper reporters refer to the injured or deceased single-occupant driver of a vehicle. To be gender-correct (and wrong), they refer to him or her as "they".

8/13/19 Board Meeting - Special Recognition

At the August 13, 2019 Regular Board Meeting the Special Recognition portion is to include acknowledgement of 13 employees.

And two trustees-elect will be recognized for completing levels of "Boardmanship" with the South Carolina School Boards Association (SCSBA).

The problem? The two trustees-elect are not legitimate Board Members of the Richland 2 School Board and should not be members of the SCSBA.

The School District is on thin ice when it pays any membership fees or course fees for Amelia McKie's and Teresa Holmes' involvement with the SCSBA, because neither McKie nor Holmes has ever legally taken the oath of office to serve as a board member.

They are trustees-elect, not Trustees.

All they have to do is take the oath of office, and they will be official. But the District and the Board seem to have dug in their heels and refuse to obey, honor and respect the state law of South Carolina.

The longer this goes on, the more serious it becomes.

Both became eligible to take the oath of office on December 4, 2018, when they filed their Statements of Economic Interests with the South Carolina Ethics Commission.

Back in March a senior officer at the Richland County Sheriff's Department asked me why McKie and Holmes didn't just take the oath of office (legally). I didn't have an answer for him.

As I recall my interview with two SLED investigators at the South Carolina Attorney General's office in May, I was asked the same question. I still didn't have an answer.

And I still don't know the answer today.

But one day the District is going to have to answer that question.