The silent treatment is bad policy in a home, or say, on a school board.
Who doesn’t have a couple of friends who used to be married but aren’t anymore after they went overboard with the silent treatment?
They bumped around the house for days or weeks on end, avoiding eye contact and exchanging no words while angrily doing the chores and taking care of the kids.
By the time they got to divorce court, the erstwhile partners were drowning in a sea of hostility, suspicion, distrust and ill will. It was the silent treatment that got the ball rolling.
Government entities, take note!
Board members who zip their lips rather than communicate with the public can end up in Election Day divorce court. They get booted out by the newcomer, the one who promises voters he or she will be a disciple of “transparency.”
The newbie takes a seat at the board table – and guess what happens next? Suddenly, he or she has umpteen reasons why taxpayers don’t need or deserve to know what’s really going on. The faces around the table change, but the silent treatment reigns, engendering hostility, suspicion, distrust and ill will among the taxpayers.
The De Soto School District provided an illustration May 18 when veteran school board member Larry Sanders resigned his seat.
Turns out Sanders moved a year ago to a home he didn’t at first realize was outside school district boundaries. Five months after that, he told the rest of the school board about his problem in a closed session. Sanders said officials checked with the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and found out he was eligible to stay on the board, although he couldn’t run for election again.
None of this was aired publicly. Unless there’s a vote, what’s talked about in a closed session usually stays in the closed session.
But a group of people who are spitting mad about the recent ouster of Vineland Elementary principal Adam Grindstaff caught wind of Sanders’ address issues and started making noise.
Sanders, who also is the current mayor of De Soto, said he quit the board because he didn’t want to become a distraction, but that he hadn’t done anything wrong.
Hmmmm… Shouldn’t taxpayers have been told – immediately – that a sitting school board member had moved outside the district but was continuing to serve?
“Nobody tried to hide anything,” Sanders told Leader reporter Kevin Carbery. “The reason I went to executive session with it was it was about personnel – me – so they could go to the state and get a ruling on it. I wanted them to know first exactly what was going on.”
Doesn’t fly.
As an elected, unpaid school board member, Sanders was not a school district staffer.
Jean Maneke, attorney for the Missouri Press Association and an expert on the state’s open meetings law (the Sunshine Law), said an admission like Sanders’ should not be relegated to a closed meeting. Under certain circumstances, secret discussions are allowed for personnel, litigation and real estate matters.
“That (Sanders’ residency) doesn’t fit into any of the exceptions allowed,” Maneke said.
Grindstaff’s supporters are now really ticked about Sanders, too.
The Fox C-6 Board of Education went silent in 2016 over the settlement and dismissal of a highly publicized lawsuit against former and current Fox administrators for allegedly making derogatory online comments about three district residents. Court records showed the case was dismissed after a settlement was reached, but no one would say how much money, if any, was paid to the plaintiffs.
It was a juicy case and Fox taxpayers were eager for details. None ever came. District officials said their insurance provider (paid for by taxpayers to the tune of $425,580 a year) had handled the case and kept the district out of the loop.
The Leader filed a Sunshine Law complaint with the state Attorney General’s Office, but it did no good. Deafening silence.
In the last few months, the Leader has gotten numerous calls and emails from frustrated residents of the Grandview R-2 School District who want details about an FBI investigation into alleged financial irregularities and the dismissal of the district’s business manager.
Superintendent Matt Zoph said officials want to spill the beans, but have been ordered by the FBI to keep mum. A town hall has been promised once the FBI has completed its work.
At least that’s the right instinct, and let’s hope the promise is kept. From the tone of those Grandview callers and emailers, they really, really want to know.
Information can be inconvenient, or disheartening, or embarrassing. It can stir things up and cause trouble.
But those of you who convinced voters to put you in a chair at the table should know that the facts don’t really belong to you. They belong to the people who granted you your small measure of power.
And those folks don’t deserve the silent treatment.
