Among the agenda items discussed at last night’s school board meeting was the appointment of board members to a committee to prepare an employee handbook for the district (agenda item 13c). Two were appointed.
A handbook, of course, has a much greater significance in districts that will, overtime, be without public-employee collective bargaining. (Here I am assuming that ongoing litigation about Act 10 will end with the Wisconsin Supreme Court upholding that law.)
One should be clear about Act 10 as it was offered, not as it has been used: whatever one thinks of it, the professed justification for that bill was to help Wisconsin overcome a structural deficit. I’d say that could and should have been done in other ways, but no matter: such was the justification for Act 10.
In the absence of public-employee collective bargaining, where there are no longer union agreements in force, some districts and municipalities have crafted employee handbooks with significantly altered employee rights.
One cannot emphasize enough what a distraction and mistake those districts have made in their preoccupation with altering employee-employer obligations in this way.
Our school district‘s obligation is to advance substantive learning, athletics, and the arts, fairly to all, and within a reasonable budget. Lengthy debates about dress codes, or other employer-employee policies, only sap energy and distract from those key objectives.
Often the explanations in favor of these peripheral matters are embarrassingly weak. Only recently, Janesville’s superintendent offered a poorly-reasoned defense of a stricter teacher dress code.
I commented on it recently. (See, The Janesville Schools’ Cautionary Tale for Whitewater.) Janesville should not have wasted its time on a teacher dress code. Her school board should have spent those many hours crafting a better set of standards for a superintendent.
We have no reason to make Janesville’s mistake, on dress codes or a dozen other employer-employee matters.
Our emphasis should and must be on substantive student accomplishment. Our concern should be to deliver these accomplishments as economically as possible. Anything else is a sideshow.
I’m confident we’ll do well, and better than others.