Last night was my first Scranton School Board meeting as a member.  It was heartening to see so many members of the public in the audience.  Dr. Finan, our Recovery Officer, needs to hear how much our schools, libraries, and arts programs matter to us.  We need to preserve them and, one day, restore them.  It sounded to me as though she got the message.

As per what is now a daily occurrence, my to-do list has grown further.  Concerns about our Title 1 program (pre-K) and our grading system came up, so I’ll be looking into that.

It’s a goal of mine to let the public know my thought process on everything, so I’m going to explain why I voted the way I voted on the big ticket items.

There were 3 items that I wouldn’t have thought of as controversial, but got reactions, so I’ll explain my votes (I mean, I’ll do that with all of my votes anyway, of course).

1. Board members get packets before meetings.  I read mine more than once.  It’s a lot of information to digest and I went through and made notes and prepared.  The resumes and cover letters for the Recovery Committee positions were in there.  Ms. Gilmartin asked that they be read aloud and it sounded to me that the reason was because Board members may not have read them.  I’ve witnessed this already at the first work session. My thought: do your homework, I did mine.  So I voted to move on.  The documents are public regardless of whether or not they were read aloud, and agendas are published online before meetings, so in theory it should’ve already been available.

   That said, one audience member pointed out that the public may not yet have seen them and would want to hear them.  Not all people are online, and, honestly, the SSD website can sometimes be hard to navigate.  Because I can understand all of those points, I’m glad it passed, despite my vote.  Now I know better for next time.  And thanks to all of the people who offered me a different perspective.  I’m here to listen, learn, and grow.

2. I voted for Mrs. Dixon and Mr. Popil to be representatives to the Recovery Committee.  Dixon has more experience in public education than all of us on the Board combined.  It’s important to me that somebody with a background in public education be on that committee.  Popil is a retired auditor who worked on school district audits for 35 years!  Nobody has more financial experience related to school districts than him, and with the Auditor General (rightly) criticizing us all the time, it made sense to support him. The only thing I found odd was that people weren’t able to give a speech and the Board wasn’t able to ask questions.  It probably wouldn’t have been a bad thing to gather more information that way, but that wasn’t the procedure.  I do know that the Recovery Committee and process is very strictly regulated by law.
3. For much the same reason I listed above, I voted for Mr. Popil to represent the Board at the NEIU.  Some of our savings, I believe, will come from in-housing work we do in conjunction with the NEIU.  With Popil’s background as a school auditor, I believe he’ll be more able to find and generate savings for the district (which we need desperately).

Hopefully that shines a light on my logic.  I plan to do this for each meeting, so people will always know where I stand.  I’m always open to feedback, so feel free to get in touch!  My new district email is tom.borthwick@ssdedu.org.

When I do my weekly roundup, I’ll talk more about my impressions of Dr. Finan and where I think things are heading.

Thanks for reading.

(NOTE: I just found out that agendas are not posted online, which should change.  Stupid assumption on my part.  I’m going to work on that, too.)