At Thursday’s meeting, board member Becky Carson raised concerns about not being able to review information from individual schools that asked for waivers on library media specialists. She said the support documents weren’t sent to her until Wednesday evening, and she stayed up until 4 a.m. to review them. She requested the materials be sent out 72 hours in advance.
“Each member of this board is here to serve the will of the people,” Carson said. “And since we’re not able to research items efficiently, I don’t believe we’re actually able to do that, because we’re not able to prepare properly for those things.”
Other board members agreed.
“It’s maybe a hard ask, but I would just ask that even if you had to send 90% of it, to do it three or four days ahead of time,” Michael Tinney said. “... We’re not going to know everything about everything anyway, but we’re going to be as well informed as we can.”
It’s an issue that has come up before. At the February board meeting, three newly appointed board members complained they didn’t have time to read through controversial academic standards sent to them hours before the meeting.
At that meeting, member Ryan Deatherage asked for more time to review the standards. Walters falsely told members that to make legislative deadlines, the standards needed to be approved that day.
It was revealed to the public after the February vote on the standards that they had been updated to include “discrepancies in 2020 election results.”
Before the board’s April meeting, the department distributed a packet with a copy of the email sent to board members at 4:01 p.m. the afternoon before the February standards vote with attachments to the updated standards. This prompted GOP lawmakers to make an unsuccessful attempt at rejecting the standards, citing the quick turnaround.
“I think this whole issue would have gone by if we would have just slowed down the process and let us understand what was in there,” Deatherage said at the April meeting.
Carson, who joined the board last month, brought up an example during Thursday’s meeting of a request from the Stonewall Public Schools superintendent, who requested a shorter calendar year — a request Carson said was written in April.
“He closes his letter with, ‘Please reach out if you have any questions and need additional information,’ which most of them do,” Carson said. “At 6:15 last night, I can’t do that.”
Walters said he would be “happy to explore” the idea of getting pieces of the documentation to the board beforehand, but said he receives last-minute information up to when the board meeting starts.
To allow more time to review the waiver requests, the board voted unanimously to postpone voting on all of them until the next meeting in July.
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