As per usual, Monday evening Board of Education meetings conflict with my work schedule, but I was able to tune in for the section in which the Board took up Jim Bowman’s resolution. In that resolution, the Board of Education encourages everyone in the community to follow all health and safety guidelines put forth by public health officials to stop the spread of Coronavirus.
Some concerns were expressed that the resolution would give the impression that they were “blaming” the community, but it still passed unanimously as originally written after less than 10 minutes of conversation.
I typically put brackets around any editorial asides I make while recapping and reporting on what happens at the various government meetings that are going on in Appleton, but I’m not going to bother with that here because the entire rest of this post is going to be editorializing.
Once again I am struck by the difference between city of Appleton Common Council/committee meetings and Board of Education meetings. It is unlikely that the Common Council would pass a resolution of this nature and public interest without a fairly drawn out discussion in which they examined and took into consideration all the various public concerns. There would almost certainly be at least one motion to amend, if not more and the final text of the resolution might very well end up being markedly different from the resolution that was first brought forward. The recent Trick-or-Treating resolution is a good example of this. There’s about a zero percent chance that they would handle a resolution of this nature in the blasé manner the Board of Education did.
Beyond that, at a basic level, it seems very inappropriate for the Board of Education to be passing resolutions directing the actions of members of the surrounding community. Legally speaking, there are limits to the control the district can exert on even their own employees’ behavior when those employees are on their own time, and I suspect that were the Board of Education to pass a nonbinding resolution directing teachers and staff members to behave a certain way outside of school hours it would go over poorly with the teachers’ union How much more so a resolution directing the entire surrounding community to act per the Board of Education’s desires?
None of that even touches on the fact that this resolution is completely and utterly outside the Board of Education’s realm of purview or responsibility. I would like to suggest that the very fact that it was so far outside their bailiwick was perhaps a contributing factor as to why they handled it so much less responsibly than the Appleton Common Council would have. Unlike the members of the Board of Education, Common Council members are actually elected to represent the community and that does include sometimes speaking to and on behalf of the community en masse. Wielding that authority responsibly requires care and deliberation. Given that they have exactly zero authority in this area, perhaps the Board of Education was simply completely ignorant of the thought and care that ought to go into a declaration directed toward 75,000+ people.
It also seems more than a little ridiculous to me that the Board of Education is worried about opening up schools because of the potential harm such action could cause the community, but it’s also suggesting that it can’t open up schools until the community stops causing harm to itself by not following safety guidelines.
Maybe the AASD leadership should focus a little less on the community and a little more on the thing they are ostensibly responsible for which is educating the youth of our city.
You can watch the full 11/23/2020 Board of Education meeting here: https://youtu.be/-H-2LJ8eOAU
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