School Board May Have Broken Law
OK, it should be obvious to everyone at this point that this school rezoning plan is a public-policy disaster. Not only are a growing number of the city’s African American leaders voicing outrage over it, saying it would re-segregate our schools, but now we have learned in a memo from former superintendent Pedro Garcia that at least some members of the Metro school board may have violated the state open meetings law by deliberating privately about the plan last year.
In the memo, Garcia writes that in a meeting last November board member Steve Glover told him he already had secured a majority of the board to vote for the plan. “He indicated to me that he had five votes for the plan that had been proposed,” Garcia writes.
The open meetings law was weakened somewhat in the last legislative session, but at that time it prohibited two or more members of a governing body from deliberating or deciding an issue except in a public meeting. So how did Glover, a white board member from Hermitage, know there were five votes for the plan without discussing it with other members?
Glover wouldn't return phone calls for comment. But at least two board members, George Thompson and Ed Kindall, both of whom are black, think Glover may have broken the law.
“This is the kind of skullduggery that’s caused this school system to be pushed down into the ground,” Thompson says.
Garcia sent his memo to Kindall in January. Kindall says he released it to the media yesterday to try to derail tonight’s scheduled board vote on rezoning.
“I was hoping that this zoning stuff would resolve itself in an amicable way but it appears people are pushing it to the point where they just want to ram it through,” Kindall says. “Mr. Glover was saying he had five votes. That worries me. We operate under what’s called the sunshine law. You’re not supposed to have five votes before we get to the meeting, are you?”
The NAACP just held a news conference to demand that the school board delay action on rezoning. “There are some components that are going to have a very, very negative impact and it’s going to roll us back 50 years,” says Marilyn Robinson, president of the NAACP’s Nashville chapter. “We’re asking the board to defer this. We want more involvement. We can improve upon this. There are certain parts of this plan that we cannot accept. They’re going to keep all the poor black children together. We don’t want that. We need diversity. We want to offer an alternative. We want to offer some input since this impacts us.”
Comments
“This is the kind of skullduggery that’s caused this school system to be pushed down into the ground,” Thompson says.
oh honestly.
Kindall routinely lines up his votes in advance.
For Kindall and Thompson, everything is about race, not about educating students. This plan will not set Nashville back 50 years. That is nonsense. As the board continues making Incredibly Stupid Policy, the white middle class will continue their exit from the system, and when it's complete, Kindall, Thompson, et al, will have nothing left to diversify.
A variety of community stakeholders had plenty of opportunity to be involved in this plan on the front end. If they did not avail themselves of the opportunity, now they want to whine and pick up their toys and go home, cry racism? This is not a perfect plan. There will never be a perfect plan. But some plans are better than others, and this one is one of those. For years, we have been offered badly needed plans, and they were shot down for the sacred cow of "diversity." Deferring this plan to the next board will just give us more of the same. The plans always get deferred "to the next board," and then the next board does ... nothing. Vote on the damn plan. And move on. And, hey, Kindall should go find something else to do with his time, because his agenda is not about education and what's best for Nashville's students.
Posted 07/08/2008 at 12:01:05 PMKindall's attempt to claim that the rezoning plan would sacrifice socio-economic diversity, as well as racial diversity, was one of the weakest claims he could possibly make. Many families in the well-off neighborhoods around Hillwood send their kids to private school, and I expect a turnaround in the next few years so that Hillwood will resemble its student body make-up twenty-five years ago, with a student body with a wide range of incomes. On the other hand, poorer neighborhoods are still within the Hillwood district, some of which have become more Hispanic in the last decade. On top of that, Bellevue has become more racially diverse over time. Kindall's hanging on to a forty or fifty year old vision of the area south of the river and west of West End/Harding, where north Nashville was a black enclave in a sea of white people. Glad the school board didn't put up with that argument.
Posted 07/09/2008 at 07:42:26 AMIt's an empirical question and one which should be closely monitored. Hillsboro High does not reflect the distict that it represents. If the school system can't figure out how to stop moving students/families around, no one will trust that where they are zoned will remain consistent over time.
Posted 07/09/2008 at 08:03:27 AMJeff:
I wouldn't automatically assume that Glover (of whom I have a generally low opinion, by the way) actually met with or lobbied other board members.
You acknowledge in your story that Glover had a reputation for yelling and bluster. Given his history, it's altogether possible that Glover believed that four others would vote with him and used this belief in an attempt to bluff and bully Garcia. No one (especially George Thompson) appears to have considered this possibility.
Karen Johnson's adamant denial that anyone lobbied her bolsters the likelihood of this scenario, I would think.
Posted 07/10/2008 at 09:14:47 AMI have some beach front property for you in Colorado if you don't believe that the Board members are talking to and lobbying each other behind the scenes.
Posted 07/10/2008 at 10:05:43 AM