School Board Meeting

So I attended the Marysville School Board meeting tonight. It is probably still going on as I write. I left early because of the long drive home and also the fact that my BS-detector was pinging so much whenever a school board member spoke that I could barely stand to be in the same room as them. The meeting was standing-room only, and after the school reports by various students, the public got a chance to speak. The board explained that they weren't answering any questions, but would listen to comments.

The first speaker was apparently the husband of a teacher. He had a prepared statement that was simply awesome. It summed up the entire situation, from the board turning over the power to the superintendent then going into hiding to the superintendent turning over the power to the PR woman and going into hiding to the fact that the PR person was caught lying on camera. At the end, he asked for the resignation of the entire board and the superintendent so the district can heal. During his entire speech, the superintendent was studiously ignoring him. If she had been a student, and the speaker her teacher, she would have gotten reprimanded for not paying attention. As it was, she ignored every speaker but one. Only one speaker was there to support the board, and she was a board member's wife, and the superintendent listened to her.

After the public speaking, two board members made comments, both of them anti-union. The board president accused the teacher's union of planning the strike simply to get their choices for board members elected. People actually laughed out loud at her when she said it. The other board member read from an article about education from our current secretary of education that was incredibly ignorant and one-sided (for instance, it talked about how "the left" was doing this and that to destroy education, then said that partisan politics shouldn't have a place in education... thus invalidating the initial statements). All-in-all, a very poor showing for the school board. I still don't know how the election will turn out tomorrow, but I cannot believe that anyone who has actually seen this board in action would vote for them.

More tomorrow night, as the election returns start coming in...