“Never mind, I don’t wanna know”

Passing the Buck

WCSD Board Meeting on January 10, 2022 Buries a Key Policy Change

This evening the school district’s Board of Education will be considering a policy change, buried within pages of boring policy changes that will likely go without significant public input. One specific proposal should be noted. It should not be pointed out for being particularly valuable or useful. This is likely a non-enforcable, semantic inclusion of suggested conduct for Board members. I believe Board members should be ethically obligated to flatly ignore it, yet without public input, it may well pass without any discussion.

Given that this policy has little more than rhetorical value, the fact it is being offered as a change to local law should be noticed by itself.

In Rule 224-1, the Board is considering the following language:

“The Board will work with the Superintendent to achieve a resolution to complaints, concerns, or controversies that may arise in a manner that is consistent with each other’s respective roles and with established policies and procedures. Individual Board members, in particular, have a responsibility to ensure that they are referring complaints, concerns, or controversies through appropriate channels and not attempting to investigate and resolve such issues in a manner that exceeds their individual authority.”

Harmless, right? Lots of buzz words and ambiguous phrases. Passing a bad policy however, is not harmless. There is no definition of what “appropriate channels” are anywhere in district policy. What does “established policies and procedures” mean? Good question, since the passage refers to none in particular. This is why I refer to this policy proposal as esoteric. No one will realize that the only method through which Board members actually can investigate anything is through referring actions to administration. So why make such a change? Why discourage BOE members from actually investigating the facts?

The issue should concern all sides of the ongoing political debates that rage over socialized education. Are parents worried about what their children are being taught in class? This policy suggests that elected officials should not investigate. Are parents concerned about systemic racism and policies that harm students of color? The policy pushes elected officials to not look into it any further.

The problem here should be obvious: what if the complaints are about administration itself? Or about the process administration uses (or fails to use) to investigate virtually anything? What if administration doesn’t want to investigate? As written by Juvenal and later popularized by Alan Moore, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” or “Who Watches the Watchmen?”

• Was your child sexually assaulted in school? The district is supposed to investigate.

• Was your child the victim of bullying? Administration is supposed to investigate.

• Were extra-curricular groups violating Board policies or health mandates? Pay no mind John Q. Public who expects consistency on covid policies! Administration will investigate!

• Privacy violations? Administration.

• Discrimination? Administration.

• Did a staff person break the law? Teach your child there is no such thing as gender? Did the teacher say there are only two genders? Did the teacher start a prayer session? Did the teacher preach on the objective truth of the anarcho-marxist worldview?

Administration. Administration. Administration. Administration. Administration.

Many individuals who have no experience with public government do not realize that elected officials functionally have no independent authority to do… anything. Actual actions on behalf of the district may only be taken by the district’s employees or those they contract with (such as legal counsel).

So why does the district feel it necessary enact a policy that says Board members should not investigate anything that is brought to their attention?

To those of you who have not been privy to closed sessions of the Board of Education over the last several years, I can generally state that there have been multiple district investigations into a wide variety of events and incidents. Many of these investigations only took place because Board Members (either myself or others) had contact with the public, which led to referrals to the district to look into concerns further. Had this policy been in effect then it is fairly certain that none of these incidents would have been investigated at all.

This paragraph, if enacted, will justify Board members not doing their jobs. In effect, it will allow Board members to justify their non-action over ANY SUBJECT by referring to administration. After all, Board members have no independent ability to investigate anything. However, while I was on the Board, I routinely “investigated” beyond simply receiving what administration told me. I filed regular open records requests, I investigated what other Board members were saying privately AND publicly, and I took it upon myself to be better educated than simply being a passive vessel receiving information from one-sides sources. This led me to being better informed, and in my opinion, being a better representative while I was privileged enough to be in that position.

In my honest opinion, it is not the representative’s job to effectively say “that’s not my responsibility” when you see or hear about a problem. Every current Waunakee Community School District board representative today is well aware that any agency will not investigate itself if it doesn’t have to. The district’s purpose is to educate, not investigate. This district is not run by lawyers and detectives, but by teachers and curriculum professionals.

However, it must be represented by elected officials who are unwilling to simply look the other way.