Opinion
By Rich Lamken, 8-10-24
Here are my remarks from Thursday night. I gave the first half during the first Workshop and the entire thing during the Nassau County School Board meeting. This will be a series of comments on multiple subjects.
Citizens prefer meetings and workshops on separate nights, not 3 back-to-back-to-back on one night, like tonight.
Citizens want to hear a summary of what takes place in executive session. To be clear, it’s a choice by the Board to not provide it. There’s only a prohibition on releasing the details of the negotiations but not releasing a summary of what the Board discussed and the direction that they gave the negotiating team. I was charged to prepare the summary of closed session for a report out when it was about negotiations.
Citizens want to hear the SB members discuss agenda items at the SB meeting and not rely only on either conversations with district staff or a SB workshop at a different time and/or date. The public deserves the opportunity to be educated by district staff at the same time as the SB. There’s nothing on tonight’s SB meeting agenda to necessitate the middle meeting tonight. I’ve attended about half of the Board agenda workshops and never found them to be either necessary or productive. If you insist on having these agenda review workshops, there needs to a video available to the public just like the Swagit videos of the Board meetings.
There should be a copy provided to attendees of what the SB is reviewing and considering at each Workshop and Board meeting. The only possible exception should be if it was provided by attaching it to the relevant agenda item online, early enough for a citizen to view it prior to the meeting.
It would be appreciated if at least one Board member would comment on these suggestions. (Several of them did and I thanked them)
Mr. Gaus complained at the Superintendent’s debate about the paucity of info provided to the SB during the Budget process and that really concerns me. Citizens were completely ignored and no information was provided to them until the vote on July 22nd, when the summary was posted on a tab labeled Budget Transparency, which, by the way, is quite an oxymoron. Nassau CDF had to do a PRR to discover what documents were created in the preparation of the district budget and were ultimately given a total of 150 documents, none of which were ever provided to the public.
In California, SB members were reminded every election cycle by the SB Association that it was both unethical and inappropriate to endorse or support a candidate for either superintendent or SB. With that background, it was very surprising to me to see Ms. Cook working the room at the Superintendent’s debate in her “Burns for Superintendent” t-shirt.
Rich Lamken is retired and lives with his wife, Meg in Fernandina Beach. He is a retired Assistant Superintendent of Schools, Human Resources/Technology. He was the Schools Division Lead of Common-Sense, Fernandina Beach and is the President of the Baptist Nassau Hospital Auxiliary.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
