The March 11th, 2014 ICCSD School Board Meeting Was Encouraging

The March 11th, 2014 Iowa City Community School District Board of Directors' meeting was encouraging. Board members Tuyet Dorau and Jeff McGinness took exception to the proposed new board guideline to suppress free speech in public comments to the board. The rest of the board agreed to send the guideline back to the school district's attorney to review constitutional issues that may have been overlooked in the guideline.

Steve Murley couldn't remember where the wording of the new guideline regarding public commentary had come from. His human resources director, Chace Ramey, recalled out loud that both he and Steve Murley had worked on the wording of that guideline.

Another victory to celebrate is that Tuyet Dorau decided to rescind her request to attend an educational convention in New Orleans at taxpayer expense. You will recall that in his op-ed here, Phil Hemingway made a point of saying that since the ICCSD Board of Directors have acted more as cheerleaders and enablers to district administrators, they have not been doing their due diligence to protect the resources meant for the children of the district, not the administration, contractors, and realtors who benefit from the largess of district funds.

Since the board have not been good stewards of taxpayer funding, they don't deserve a fun trip at taxpayer expense. I'm glad they have the sense to realize it.

Tuyet Dorau also made the excellent point that since board president Sally Hoelscher has not chosen to enforce current policy, why vote on a new public comment policy for Ms. Hoelscher to ignore?

A case in point, though Tuyet didn't mention it, would be board member Jeff McGinness' tirades from the board table against Julie Van Dyke and Phil Hemingway.

Why would board president Sally Hoelscher allow McGinness to attack members of the public that way if the goal is to maintain civility in board meetings? Shouldn't civility, if that is the goal instead of free speech, be a two-way street?

I don't think Hoelscher has done a good job running the board meetings in a fair and impartial manner.

When the three-minute alarm rings and a community commenter is obviously one or two words away from the end of his or her sentence, Hoelscher won't let the speaker finish his/her sentence. I think this kind of abrupt and unnecessary rudeness is counter-productive.