The Board of Education Needs to Set an Example

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On Tuesday night — or, rather, past midnight on Wednesday morning — the Board of Education did the same thing it’s previously done at budget season: Conduct a rushed, exhausting marathon of a meeting that sets a lousy example for students and adults by demonstrating a lack of planning. It’s also a poor way to conduct business that many town residents want to be able to monitor. 

The board members and senior district administrators shouldn’t be patting themselves on the back this morning for sacrificing their night in order to get the budget passed before February break. Sure, they need to give the Board of Finance time to review the budget. But everybody’s got deadlines. This is supposed to be a deliberative process, and midnight isn’t the time to deliberate.

The board should be conducting itself in ways that help assure everyone that its members will be making sound decisions about questions that come up at a meeting. Holding meetings from 7 p.m. to past midnight doesn’t cut it.

Look at the way the Board of Selectmen held a meeting to pass its budget on Monday, just the night before: They had hardly anything on the agenda other than the vote to pass the budget. They spent some time talking about the problem of state aid cuts and added mandates proposed by the governor. They did all that and approved previous meeting minutes in about half an hour. Their other budget work had been done in previous meetings. It’s a matter of scheduling.

True, the five members of the Board of Selectmen have a budget half the size of the education budget, but the nine members of the Board of Education have loads of staff resources to help them organize their meetings. Darien actually tends to go through its budget deliberations earlier in the year than other towns. Perhaps the Board of Education’s deliberating period could be extended later into February.

At the same Tuesday night meeting where Board of Education members raced through a list of possible budget cuts (for about two hours), the board also heard presentations on an important new alternative schooling program and on the schedule for SAT testing.

It appears those items could have been presented at an earlier meeting. If there was no time, another meeting could have been scheduled. It could be argued that more meetings are also inconvenient for everyone, but it’s hard to argue that there’s something more inconvenient than a five-hour marathon that stretches past midnight.

As the Board of Education well knows, for some time now anxiety levels have been increasing among Darien students — one of the justifications for hiring more school counseling staff in recent years. Dogs are even brought in during mid-term exam periods to help ease some of the pressure on kids.

And yet the Board of Education engages in the equivalent of last-minute all-nighters, and it does this year after year. On Valentine’s Day, no less. (It met on Valentine’s Day last year, as well — that’s no way to reduce stress. Don’t these board members have sweethearts?)

The Board of Education needs to set an example for Darien Public Schools employees, students and parents. It needs to show it takes stress and anxiety seriously by planning better. It needs not only to deliberate, but look like it’s deliberating. Optics count. The board needs to remember that “unprofessional” is a dirty word in this town.

The board pays a lot of attention to scheduling subjects for upcoming meetings. If it has too many subjects per meeting (and it does) it needs to either take up fewer of them or (more likely) it needs to hold a few more meetings during its budget season. It needs to hold them not at 8 a.m. or as late as midnight, but at times when it’s convenient for the public to monitor them. Between early January and mid-February this seems like a reachable goal (if not, start in December). Meetings shouldn’t last past 10 p.m., preferably not past 9:30 p.m.

The people who serve on Darien’s boards and commissions deserve the thanks of the community for their efforts. These volunteers put in a lot of hard work to make the town a better place. We know the members of the Board of Education work hard for this town. Nevertheless:

If you’re working past midnight, as any teacher and parent would tell any student, you’re not planning well enough. The Board of Education needs to set an example — especially since it’s been pulling this late-night stunt year after year.

And Another Thing …

And while we’re at it, we continue to be amazed that the Board of Education, Planning & Zoning Commission and (to a lesser extent) the Board of Finance still schedule their regular meetings on Tuesdays — and they can’t even seem to co-ordinate the meetings so that they aren’t on alternate Tuesdays, but the same nights during the month.

(We know Board of Finance Chairman Jon Zagrodzky has wanted avoid conflicting schedules; we also know that the Planning & Zoning Commission is trying to meet when other town land-use boards are not meeting, and Tuesdays allow them to study last-minute Friday submissions of documents over the weekend.)

There are other nights of the week, folks, and while busy boards sometimes might not be able to schedule meetings that don’t conflict, it’s passing strange that out of four or even five Tuesdays in a month, the Board of Ed and P&Z often choose to meet on the same two. It’s probably not a conspiracy to keep the public away, but it sure looks like the boards aren’t trying. There are other weeknights and every month has four weeks in it.

Perhaps the town should pass an ordinance mandating that regular meetings be held only on certain days of the week and month for certain boards. Having every single important town board meet on Mondays and Tuesdays is ridiculous. It’s just that simple.

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