Brooks' "in secret" evaluation to continue Friday morning

The APS School Board will meet in secret again Friday morning, link, for the purpose of discussion and action regarding the Superintendent’s Evaluation.

They will meet in secret in the face of a self evident conflict of interests.

It is in board members and golden parachute signer's on personal best interests, to make their support of the superintendent appear justifiable.

The worse the superintendent looks, the worse looks their judgement in just having given him such an unjustifiably generous parachute. 

We cannot simply ignore conflicts of interest in meetings in secret.

To do so implies absolute and unequivocal trust in school board members.

In these circumstances, that level of trust is utterly unjustifiable.  They refuse to create a record of any of their meetings in secret, and not because the law requires them to create no record, but because the law allows them to create no record.

Will they consider how teachers and other employees feel about working under Brooks and in a "culture of fear of retaliation" against whistleblowers and other complainants?

Will they ask him why the investigation of felony criminal misconduct involving senior APS administrators is being hidden from public knowledge.

Will they examine Brooks' record as the senior-most administrative role model of student standards of conduct. Will they examine their own records as the very senior-most role models of student standards of conduct, in the entire APS?

Will they consider how community members feel about their superintendent, except to support the spending of a half million dollars a year on the effort to convince everybody that he's doing just fine?

In spite of the self evident and still unaddressed conflict of interests, they will meet again in secret.

• They will not permit stakeholders to ask questions.
• They will not allow legitimate complaints to be leveled at any member of the leadership of the APS.
• They will not allow names to be named, unless you have something good to say.
• They will not follow their meeting with an open and honest public "reasonably specific"discussion of what they did in secret.

It is in meetings such as these where the board decided to give Brooks a golden parachute worth as many as 750,000 dollars.

There is only one reason to hide the truth, and that is to
avoid the consequences that telling the truth brings.

If we really want students to grow into adults
who embrace character and courage and honor,
someone has to show them what they look like.




photo Mark Bralley