Your Vote Matters

 

By Gretchen Garrity

At the May 30, 2023 Ozark School Board meeting, a small but significant event occurred that illustrates the importance of electing the right people to serve on the board.

Although the sound and video quality is poor, the meeting can be seen below, and the issue begins at around the 38-minute mark, when the Missouri School Boards Association’s (MSBA)-recommended policy changes were next on the agenda.

According to the time-stamp notes on the recorded video, “Supt presents package of revised policies from the MSBA, explains that District staff reviews those policies then makes recommendation to board to approve them with suggestions...”

Per school board policy, agenda packets should be available four days in advance of the monthly meeting, but the packet was not available until late on the Friday before Memorial Day, a three-day weekend/holiday. This meant the board would need to look over their information packets during the holiday weekend in order to be ready for the Tuesday meeting start at 4 p.m.

Consequently, a small but important recommendation was nearly rubber-stamped by the school board. It involved what looked like minor changes in policy text, but these and other similar changes were sprinkled throughout several of the over twenty documents the school board needed to review.

The changes for policies included replacing pronouns like “he/she” to “they” or “their.” In one striking example of bending over backwards to exclude pronouns that indicate “he” or “she” was this below. The green text is the new change. The text to be replaced is in red with a strike through. Click on the image for better clarity.

 The first nine words of the above sentence includes the word “student” three times. The awkwardness of the sentence was apparently worth being able to exclude the pronouns “he” or “she.” Another example:

 A board member pointed out these were grammatically incorrect within the context of the policies. What may have accounted for the change? Board members discussed that it might be to save space or for a more nefarious reason. At any rate, Board Member Christina Tonsing was the only member who had noticed the revisions. To the board’s credit, they voted 7-0 to leave the original language in the policy handbook, which stopped gender pronoun language from being inserted.

To recap:

1) Board members were given access to the board packet late on a Friday of a three-day holiday weekend.

2) Administrative staff previously reviewed the packets before sharing with board members, and recommended that the MSBA changes be adopted into the Ozark School District policy handbook “with suggestions.”

    a) Either the staff members did not review the packets,

    b) The packets were reviewed and approved because administrative staff approved of all the changes, 

     c) Administrative staff did not notice the changes as problematic, or glossed over them.

3) One board member noticed the changes that smacked of a creeping gender ideology being inserted into the policy handbook, and mentioned it at the meeting.

4) The school board did the right thing when the issue was addressed.

Several things stand out:

1) Why is the Missouri School Boards Association sending packets to the administrative staff to review ahead of the meeting instead of to the Ozark School Board?

2) If the MSBA is sending recommended policy changes to the school board, how and why is the administrative staff getting access and reviewing them before the board?

3) How often has the school board simply taken the recommendations of the MSBA and the administrative staff as adequate and consequently rubber-stamped policy changes that are under their local purview?

One alert school board member was able to avert an insertion of, at best, poor grammar into the policy handbook. At worst, it was an attempt to begin inserting gender ideology into official documents.

Elections matter.

There are two seats on the Ozark School Board that are coming open in 2024. The deadline to file as a candidate is December of this year.