School Board Meeting
February 8th 2011
In a long process of board member updates and policy discussions, the most interesting part of the PSD
Board Meetings is the time set aside for the community comments. There is time set aside both towards the
beginning of the board meeting as well as towards the end. In this particular board meeting there were four
people who got up and spoke in front of the board. The second person who got up presented spoke about an
issue that hit pretty close to home: the Climate Change Assembly that was going to be presented at Fossil Ridge
on February 25th. Seeing as I work in the building I have heard many of the concerns of the students and the
parents about the bias of this particular presentation. This particular speaker got up to voice his concerns about
the one-track agenda and biased opinions that were going to be presented to the students at Fossil. He was
requesting that the BOE research the intentions of this presentation, although I wasn’t sure what he wanted the
board to do. He was implying that they put a stop to the presentation, but at no time in his presentation did he
actually ask the board to do that. The question that I was left with after the meeting was did the board
investigate the situation and how did they go about doing that? I know for a fact that the assembly did not get
cancelled and I am assuming that whoever researched the situation found out that the ESS teachers at Fossil
approached the assembly with the intention of making sure the other side of the issue was addressed in the ESS
classes after the assembly.
After the community comments there was a section of the meeting devoted to an informational report by
Kim Bloemen, the Early Childhood coordinator, about their new tuition-based program that was implemented
for the first time this year. They were discussing a 30-page report that she had constructed for the board
members as an update on the success and challenges of the program. One comment that Ms. Bloemen made that
really stood out to me as she was answering a questions of one of the board members (Tom) was that he should
come out and visit their program sometime to check out how things are going and what some of their programs
look like. It made me wonder how often the board members are in the schools visiting and observing some of
the practices that are being implemented by teachers and administrators. I was pretty impressed by some of the
questions that were being asked and I can’t imagine how much time and commitment would have to be put into
all the issues that have to be addressed by the board.
Watching this board meeting really brought up some questions that I never really thought to consider
before, like how similar the process of selecting the board members resembles the selection of politicians in the
United States. It is clear that the process of the board and the decisions they make is modeled after the
democratic ideals of our country. I am also curious as to what the requirements are for someone to be elected as
a member of the board. Is it required that they have teaching and/or administrative experience before they can
be elected as a member? Having only been a teacher in the district for two years, I haven’t had much time to
give any thought to how some of the large decisions are made and it’ll be interesting to start paying more
attention to the policies that are implemented in our district.