Please share your comments and opinions on the Task Force.
posted by Candidate at
6:27 PM
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This blog was established to allow the community to participate in the dialog surrounding District 46's attempt to pass a $25M referendum. We welcome all sides to participate in the discussion. (Note: this attempt is $7M more than the failed referendum of $18M six months ago)
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Synopsis of the first Task Force meeting:
The group's 1st meeting was last Thursday, May 4. The hand picked (by the superintendent) task force is comprised of 51 people, 31% of them (16 people) are school staff. Furthermore, 24% of the total (12 of the 16 staff) do not reside within the district and thus do not pay taxes to our schools. Would you consider this a balanced cross representation of the community? Can employees really be objective when their careers/paychecks depend on the superintendent?
To add to the imbalance, 4 community members who properly applied and expressed their willingness to serve on the task force have been rejected by the superintendent.
Discussion and considerable disagreement ensued within the group as to who can and who can not participate in the group. Finally a vote was taken with the result to not accept any further community members.
To sum this up: as their first action this task force, with the help of a block of 24% non-community members (non-taxpayers) voted to exclude community members from participating in this so-called 'public engagement process'.
While I truly respect every individual teacher/administrator on this group for their dedication to our school and our children and value their professional expertise, they should not have the right to vote on our community issues .... you have to be a district resident to do so. It is unacceptable to me if non-residents are deciding which path our schools are taking to handle future growth and how our tax-dollars will be spent. Any solutions have to be developed by the community and recommendations have to be made by the true stakeholders, the taxpayers.
Please let me know if this is too much to ask for!
The next task force meeting will be Wed. May 17 at 7:00 p.m.
By
Anonymous, at 8:25 PM, May 06, 2006
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