There’s a public meeting this Wednesday, March 30th, at 6:00 in the Middle School Commons area, to discuss the board’s plan to let Merit Academy occupy a portion of the Middle School building starting next school year.
Superintendent Neal is a finalist for a position up in Anchorage. It does seem like a good opportunity, and him being stuck between the staff and a hostile school board can’t make for a fun work environment. Read more here.
A large turnout at a school board meeting is not a sign of things going well! Read more here.
Article can be read here.
As per the agenda, “Members of the Board of Education will attend the Community Linkage meeting and meet with School Accountability Committee Members.” 6:00PM, in the District Office Large Conference Room.
The topic of discussion is not specified in the agenda.
Read more at KRDO’s website.
KRDO has a story covering the happenings up in here in our school district, you can read it here or watch the video below. If you’re curious what questions KRDO asked of our board, you can view that email, obtained via CORA, here.
A work session for tomorrow, 3/11 has been announced. Agenda can be viewed here.
Time is 12-1:30; the only item in the agenda is, “Members of the Board of Education will be given a tour of Summit Elementary School”
On January 29, 2022, David Illingworth sent Dr. Neal and email where he requested
that Dr. Neal “use your best judgement in preparing a list of positions in which a change in personnel
would be beneficial to our kids, and would likewise help the union see the wisdom in cooperation rather
than conflict.”
A CORA request on 3/7/2022 for more information on whether such a list was ever created, yielded this response:
Findings: Per Superintendent Dr. Mathew Neal – no list was ever created, nor has a list been received by the Superintendent. No further emails were found.
(source document)
Analysis – this is encouraging, though it is unknown if there have been verbal discussions regarding this topic, if people may have been named outside of an official list.
Speculation – Illingworth has been a vocal critic of the WPEA union, especially in last night’s board meeting. However, he previously advocated chartering Merit as the priority along with a ‘flood zone’ tactic of other issues to reduce the effectiveness of opponents (read source email here). Considering how strong his anti-union rhetoric was in last night’s board meeting (see video, part 1), is this all just an attempted distraction from his admitted top priority of Merit Academy? I think this very likely.
For those of you unable to attend the March 9th regular board meeting, the livestream on YouTube was recorded and can be downloaded here. Part 1 encompasses the portion up to the Public Comment section. Part 2 is the Public Comment section. Part 3 is the remainder of the meeting, up to the point where they went to executive session and the livestream cut out.
There was a fantastic turnout of concerned citizens at this meeting! Which of course should not be considered a ‘good’ thing for a school board meeting…it’s usually a sign of something wrong!