Monday night’s school board open session saw, among other items, a unanimous decision to maintain the existing close contacts and quarantine guidance, goals presentations from four administrators, a district administrator report predominantly on the results of parents’ and students’ survey preferences and class selection for the next semester, and discussion whether to have school board meetings more frequently.
The full agenda for the meeting is available; the complete recording of the meeting is embedded above.
A few remarks —
1. Close Contacts, Quarantine Guidance. Over time, federal officials at the CDC have adjusted various guides and protocols for managing the coronavirus safely. Recent guidance changes in early December, however, come with additional demands for monitoring and testing that have not been used, and will not be available, in the Whitewater Unified School District. The school board unanimously voted to keep the district’s existing close contact and quarantine protocols (that are somewhat lengthier, but less demanding in testing) than the more recent federal revisions.
2. Presentations of Goals. Four administrators (Brokopp of Lakeview Elementary, Fountain of Whitewater Middle School, Heim of Pupil Services, and Sylvester-Knudtson of Business Services) gave presentations of goals.
They’re embedded below. Are they not, truly, among the most important matters for this public school district? There will never be enough discussion about – and accomplishment of – worthy goals.
3. Homelessness. We have a number of students who are homeless through lack of housing, inadequate utilities, or inadequate space. There is a federal definition of these types of homelessness (42 U.S.C. §11434a), but if there had been no definition there would yet be these three states of deprivation.
4. Business Services. It’s to the district’s benefit that a recent audit (where audit is defined broadly) returned concerns neither large nor small. In a similar way, it’s sensible to look toward the upcoming budget cautiously, with conservative assumptions.
5. Asides.
On budgets. There are, of course, structural limits to the possible, yet the chosen direction of this school board and this district administrator cannot simply been a series of budgetary calculations. The sacrifice of substantive learning or academic culture merely to assure the greatest attendance from across the district’s territory would be an unwelcome, indeed destructive, assurance.
On the pandemic. An evaluation of this district’s public-health decisions should wait until the end of the pandemic. There is much, too much amateur epidemiology that has, bluntly, been used and misused by all sides in this debate. Every well-meaning (but inexpert) use of statistics in the movement is only met with a score of denials, rationalizations, crackpot theories, liberty claims without true personal responsibility, and narcissistic exhortations that others should simply ‘get over it.’
I’m out and about each day with the recommended precautions of mask, distance, and sanitizer. Personal worry prompts none of my views; a normal, humane concern for others’ injuries, and awareness of societal failures exacerbating those injuries, is inspiration enough.
If we, as a community, had done a better job of teaching and socializing our next generation we would not face a score of denials, rationalizations, crackpot theories, liberty claims without genuine personal responsibility, and narcissistic exhortations.