September often brings rains, and this year we've had modest amounts so far. Here is what an inch of rain at 4:00 am looks like. Pickups can manage this, but if you are in a car I recommend going around.
Below is the agenda for the September 18, 2023 6:00pm board meeting, with a few of my highlights/comments on the agenda. To get good at reading agendas, I recommend that you contrast the agenda with prior ones to see where they differ. Here is last month's agenda.
And, here are a few comments on this agenda:
Agenda item 2 adding "Opening Ceremonies" is new. If this is what I've argued elsewhere in this site that the Board should be doing, I'll be heaping praise on the Board in my follow up post. Stay tuned.
Note the earlier start time at 6:00.
Agenda Item 6 on Student Code of Conduct: Have you ever found a student who didn't have a beef with some portion of a Code of Conduct? Seriously, it's a rite of passage to take issue with those things. Here's what I wish an adult had told me in high school, especially knowing what I know now about open government laws (that didn't exist back then!): Go to the school board meeting and, before they adopt it,
Consent agenda item 6 d on the BoardBook service will bring the Board current on digitizing its meeting records. This is a good thing. It was, frankly, embarrassing to watch Supt. DeSpain scramble for paper copies at meetings during his tenure.
Listing closed session items separately carries with it burden of identifying the closed session exception that applies. I don't have an opinion about these at this time, except with this caveat: the Board is spending the public's money, and anything they feel comfortable enough to say about money in closed session they should discuss in open session. Clearly, one of the reasons it was impossible to decipher, for example, the $98,000 budget amendment for athletics was that none of that was discussed during an open meeting...and Athletic Director Conner was never asked to justify the spending before the money was spent. Any department head wanting more money should be required by administration to come to the board meeting and justify it, especially given the reduced budget just approved.
More comments may be posted here before meeting time.