The Infamous School Board Meeting

The meeting started by awarding high-achievers in the school district. First the elementary students, then seniors in Goshen High, then adults part of a successful committee. They went through some of the happenings currently in the district to keep the board informed. One interesting proposal was about iPad and Android apps for each of the schools. It was highly praised, as was mostly everything presented at the beginning, including test scores and IB courses. Interestingly, the school sports very high test scores on AP and IB exams despite having around 65% of students on free-reduced lunch.

            Another cool program was the Music Together program, which uses singing and dancing to establish connections between parents and their young toddlers. This program is apparently a really big deal and Goshen is the center for research and development of this program in the country (I learned this elsewhere). That pretty much ended the reporting section, where people presented their data and the board applauded them and asked for any questions. Next was the Action-item section.

            During the action section, the board would read over an idea, possibly do a quick overview of it, then the president would call a vote using the audible word “I” as a vote for yes. All the votes were unanimous, and it seemed there was not much time allotted for anyone who might disagree.

            I think it is worth mentioning that I heard many of the vocabulary words from the sheet while listening to the talks. Specifically, I heard the terms, summative test, magnet school, and charter school, and I know there were a few more that I forgot to record. It was interesting how applicable those terms were already.

            This meeting was pretty much what I expected. I viewed the democratic system much the same as a do now, but I did expect much more arguing and negativity. There was a surprisingly low negativity content in the room, very few critical comments, and no arguing—much more civil than expected.

            School boards seem to be a group of top individuals in the school system who are in charge of various sectors of the schools who can all put their minds and opinions together to make decisions about the schools. They use democracy to find what the majority of the members want to make the calls on financial, school content, technological, and allocation-based decisions. Rather than having one person do it or a large body like congress, which takes a very long time to pass anything, a small elite group is used to make decisions. They have the power through that system to approve or deny proposed actions to happen in the school system. They can provide funding for certain departments and take it away.

            This felt a lot more connected to the classroom than I think most board meetings would be. They had students involved for a good portion of the meeting, and they covered topics that related directly to the classroom such as the AP and IB exams. Some of the content, more financial stuff like the increasing of the cost for free-reduced lunch, seemed to be distant from the classroom because they didn’t address how that would affect the individual students. However, for the most part, the meeting seemed to keep daily school life in perspective.

            Though as I said earlier, there were no heated debates, I still learned a lot about the workings of the school board and its functions.