Fallbrook Union Elementary SD still wants to keep secrets, even after Appellate Court says pay Elaine Allyn $1.05 million

Court Sides With District Employee Who Balked at Order to Purge Emails

By Ashly McGlone 

Voice of San Diego

July 25, 2017 

A fired school district IT director who objected to orders to wipe out the email archive system was rightfully awarded over $1 million by a jury in 2015, an appellate court decided this month.
Elaine Allyn accused the Fallbrook Union Elementary School District of wrongful termination in 2012, and a jury unanimously awarded her $1.05 million for lost income and $148,000 in damages in 2015...

The district’s legal fees fighting Allyn’s claims have cost more than $800,000 to date....

...[A] statement provided by Fallbrook’s assistant superintendent Bill Billingsley said the school board is deciding next steps with legal counsel.

The statement, provided on behalf of Fallbrook’s superintendent Candace Singh, said in part: “The District is clearly disappointed in the appellate court’s decision and is reviewing its options to challenge it further. Although the jury found in the plaintiff’s favor, the leadership of FUESD steadfastly maintains that Mrs. Allyn was not a whistleblower, and that her own misconduct justified her termination from the District.”...

Read more HERE.

Update on West Valley Elementary in Cupertino: was the principal the only problem?

Parents at West Valley Elementary in Silicon Valley are rightly upset by the disruption caused by the involuntary transfer of all twenty-five teachers from their children's school--and I agree that this is a bad situation for the students.

But the causes of the current dismal situation might be more complex than parents think. I doubt that the most recent principal was the sole cause of the conflict. I suspect that an unhealthy culture developed at the school over a number of years. Most schools are highly political institutions with constant maneuvering by certain teachers and administrators to establish power. There are usually a few people struggling to behave professionally, but those people are not likely to be highly influential for the simple reason that humans tend to follow those who have the most political power.

Parents need to establish a new culture of healthy, open communication among all adults at the school--and the PTA might not be the ideal vehicle for this. A new organization of parents concerned about poor communication at the school would seem to be a reasonable response to the crisis.

While parents do not have the right to be informed about personnel matters, they DO have the right to establish a culture of open discussion and mutual respect among all stakeholders.

It's amazing how much trouble can result from small problems that are not handled professionally by teachers and administrators. Teacher cliques sometimes react with remarkable outrage to small changes in daily schedules, curriculum, training programs and committee assignments. And the most powerful teachers often launch into destructive fury when they are given unpopular class assignments or when the principal fails to suspend a student when the teacher demands it.

But administrators are often even more politically motivated than teachers. "WVE town" provided this reaction to my original post about this story:

 ...The teachers were asked to attend a consultant's "Human Systems Dynamics" training class, which the Superintendent falsely portrayed as "multiple interventions". Superintendent Gudalewicz discussed it with the School Board in a single closed session without a vote, and then she told parents that teachers would apply and interview for to return to their positions, but internal district leaks revealed that all the teachers would be transferred. Within a week, they started using the description "reconstitution", Superintendent Gudalewicz, and the School Board led by Phyllis Vogel, refused to meet with parents in open meetings all through the summer. One thing to note is that the consultant Royce Holladay of Human Systems Dynamics that was paid $15,000 to "facilitate" the failed teacher session is now hired to facilitate the "re-imaging" of the school which was said would take 3 to 5 years. From the internal emails obtained, it is a story of administration arrogance and retribution, facilitated with some consultant greed.

"WVE town" also wrote this very interesting piece for the Cupertino Patch, summarizing the secretive and dishonest behavior of district officials. Sadly, this secrecy and dishonesty sounds typical of most school districts. If anyone is going to start an honest, open discussion it will have to be parents.

Poor Grades for Encinitas, Julian Schools on Transparency

Poor Grades for Encinitas, Julian Schools on Transparency

Fagen Friedman Fullfrost hires school board member 12 days after she votes to renew their contract

For more recent updates, click HERE.

UPDATE: AUG. 25, 2013

So now that Superintendent Suzette Lovely and the entire Carlsbad Unified board know that Fagen Friedman & Fulfrost was secretly talking to at least one board member, will they change their minds about renewing FFF's contract? I doubt it--most school officials like this type of law firm. Also, what other type of education law firm is there? They all belong to the National Council of School Attorneys, which seems to guarantee that they're all on the same page.

Carlsbad to redo law-firm vote
By Aaron Burgin
SDUT
Aug. 23, 2013

The Carlsbad school board on Friday announced that it will redo a vote to renew a $100,000 law-firm contract, one day after U-T Watchdog reported that one board member was in negotiations for a job with the firm at the time...

ORIGINAL POST:


Carlsbad Unified Board Member Kelli Moors

See update on this story HERE.

Compare this story to the hiring of school board member Art Palkowitz by his district's law firm, Stutz Artiano Shinoff & Holtz.

I checked the California Bar Association website, and found that Ms. Moors is not a lawyer. So it's a bit counterintuitive that she'd be hired by a law firm. Ms. Moors has worked in business development in the past, so I imagine that that's what she'll do for Fagen Friedman Fulfrost. But I wonder, did FFF have a job opening, or did they create a position for her?

And how can FFF advise the district on adhering to legal and ethical practices when it seems to be manipulating the board for its own benefit?

Link: SCHOOL TRUSTEE’S VOTE AIDED FUTURE EMPLOYER
Hiring by law firm came 12 days after contract renewal
By Aaron Burgin
SDUT
Aug. 23, 2013 updated

Regulations of the Fair Political Practices Commission, 18747(a):

“No public official shall ‘make,’ ‘participate in making,’ or ‘use his or her official position to influence’ any governmental decision ... if the decision directly relates to a prospective employer.”

18747(c): “A person is a ‘prospective employer’ of a public official if the official, either personally or through an agent, is ‘negotiating’ or has an ‘arrangement’ concerning prospective employment with that person.”

Timeline

November 2012: Voters re-elect Moors to a four-year term that expires in 2016.

March 2013: Moors is laid off from her position at the Tri-City Healthcare District.

Summer 2013: Moors contacts Fagen, Friedman and Fulfrost.

July 24, 2013: Moors participates in vote to renew district’s contract with law firm for an amount not to exceed $100,000.

Aug. 2, 2013: Moors notifies Carlsbad Superintendent Suzette Lovely, that she is accepting a position with the law firm and resigning from the board. Moors said this was the first she time she told anyone with the district of her contact with the law firm.

Aug. 5, 2013: Moors submits resignation to the Carlsbad Unified School District and the San Diego County Office of Education.

Former Carlsbad school board member Kelli Moors was hired by a law firm 12 days after she voted to renew the firm’s $100,000 contract with the district.

Moors announced Aug. 5 that she was resigning from the Carlsbad Unified School District board to take a job with Fagen Friedman & Fulfrost LLP, a statewide law firm that specializes in education and has contracts with multiple local school districts, including Carlsbad.

On July 24, the Carlsbad board had voted 4-0, with trustee Ann Tanner abstaining, to renew 23 contracts with various vendors. The Fagen contract was the largest of the group.

State law prohibits elected officials from participating in or influencing any decision that would financially benefit a prospective employer if the elected official is already in employment negotiations with the employer.

Moors told U-T Watchdog that she had been in talks with the law firm before the July 24 meeting about accepting a position there. She said she did not exert influence or persuade her fellow board members to approve the contract, which was approved without discussion.

“I never discussed my potential employment with Fagen, Friedman & Fulfrost with my fellow board members, district staff or the superintendent because I didn’t want there to be any hint of a conflict of interest,” said Moors, who was elected to the board in 2000.

Gary Winuk, enforcement chief for the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission, said an elected official’s own vote can present a conflict involving prospective employment. This, he said, includes consent agenda votes, which typically come with no discussion.

“The general rule is that once you begin employment negotiations with an outside entity, you may not make, participate in or influence a decision regarding that entity,” Winuk said.

Moors was employed at Tri-City Medical Center before her position was eliminated in March. She said she began searching for new employment several months later. She would not give a specific date when she first contacted the law firm, but said it was earlier in the summer...

Southwestern College board member resigns in protest of secrecy regarding financial information

I've been wondering why school board members ALWAYS accept the corruption in schools, and simply join the club when they get elected. I thought that perhaps the idea of standing up for ethics, the rule of law and the public good had gone out of fashion. But Bill Stewart has proved me wrong.

Several officials have been charged with crimes related to relationships with contractors and Proposition R expenditures, including board member Yolanda Salcido.

How to solve the problem? Recall Yolanda Salcido and replace her with Bill Stewart. And if that doesn't give enough votes for transparency about finances, recall any other board members who are opposing it and replace them with people who believe in transparency.



Bill Stewart served as a Southwestern trustee for four months, December 2012 to March 2013.

Southwestern College trustee resigns in protest
By Susan Luzzaro
San Diego Reader
March 2, 2013

The latest at Southwestern College is the sudden resignation of trustee William Stewart, who gave an exclusive interview to the student newspaper, the Sun, on March 1. He told news editor Thomas Baker that he was quitting in protest; he said he is frustrated with the district’s lack of transparency and lack of shared governance.

Stewart, who is a realtor and a professor of philosophy at San Diego City College, was elected in November 2012 and began serving in December; his campaign rhetoric was optimistic. He told the Sun in October, “I think I bring to the board a very student-centric perspective because the questions are: how are the students being served? Is our budget best focused on meeting the needs of our students?”

Barely four months later, in his letter of resignation addressed to the faculty and staff of Southwestern, Stewart wrote:

“I hoped to bring a level of board oversight that was unprecedented in this district…to provide you, the stake holders, with a true sense of assurance that the numbers with which you were provided were real and reliable. I wanted to provide you with a board member that with certainty could tell you that income projections were reflective of most likely case scenarios, and not worst case scenarios, which can lead to significant underestimations in projected funding.

“I wanted to provide you with assurance that the information on our college expenses provided accurate information on real time savings, and did not look artificially inflated due to positions that were on the books but were not filled. In my judgment, such accurate numbers should not be withheld from anyone and certainly should not be withheld from the scrutiny of the board. Such real numbers should be used as the proper framework by which to plan the future and to work with its employees and their bargaining units. It is my opinion that Southwestern has a precious resource in its employees, not dangerous adversaries.”

Last week, faculty members protested to the board that incorrect data was being used to drive the education plan — which in turn is driving the Proposition R facilities plan.

Prior to Stewart’s resignation, a special board meeting — which many fear will pertain to pink slips — was called for March 4.

Southwestern articulation officer Veronica Burton commented on Stewart’s resignation and on the state of the campus:

...“We have all worked so hard to make positive change and this is a huge setback. We are once again making news because of questionable practices at Southwestern. This further perpetuates the atmosphere of lack of transparency and trust...”

Read more.

If publisher Tim Crews loses his public records case, we all lose as well

See update of this story HERE.

Newton: Fighting the good fight
If publisher Tim Crews loses his public records case, we all lose as well.
October 15, 2012
Jim Newton
LA Times

The ability of Californians to scrutinize their government may rest on the outcome of a little-known case unfolding in a tiny Northern California town.

It began routinely enough. Tim Crews, the pugnacious, 69-year-old editor and publisher of the Sacramento Valley Mirror, a twice-weekly newspaper that serves Glenn County, filed a request under the California Public Records Act for records held by the local school district. Specifically, Crews was looking for evidence that district officials might have spent public money to influence the outcome of a local election.

District officials did what public officials in California all-too-often do when confronted with a request they don't like. They stalled. At first, they refused to turn over anything. Then they turned over some of the records Crews had asked for, but in a format that made it impossible to search them. And when Crews asked for attachments referred to in some of the emails released in the request, the district refused to hand them over.

Crews is nothing if not dogged. He kept at it, finally persuading a judge to review thousands of the documents in chambers. The judge spent 45 minutes going through the material and then declined, without explanation, to release any more of it.

Up to that point, the case was fairly unremarkable, one of thousands of disputed but ultimately resolved Public Records Act requests that wind their way through public agencies and courts every year. But then the judge in Crews' case, Peter Twede, did something extraordinary: He concluded that Crews' request had been frivolous, and he ordered Crews to pay not only his own legal bills but those of the school district. For the privilege of obtaining documents that were his legal right to have, Crews was ordered to pay more than $100,000, an amount later reduced to $56,000.

If the judgment stands — Crews has appealed — it would have a devastating effect on the newspaper, which only has about 2,800 paid subscribers. "It would wipe us out," Crews told me last week.

It would do more than that. If upheld by the appellate courts, the judgment would radically alter the contours of the Public Records Act in California. Imagine if every time citizens asked for records under the act, they faced the possibility of having to bear not only their own legal expenses but also those that the agency might run up defending itself. Who could afford such risk?

The consequences of Crews' case are so far-reaching that a number of organizations have come to his defense, including the First Amendment Coalition (on whose board I serve without compensation). William T. Bagley, who wrote California's public records law while in the Assembly in the late 1960s, has also filed an amicus brief in support of the editor.

Crews is used to conflict. He went to jail for five days in 2000 for refusing to identify a source. It wasn't so bad, he recently recalled. "I watched a couple movies; wrote some long, long columns." Over the last five years he's filed more than a dozen cases seeking public records or claiming violations of the state's open meetings laws. It's easy to see why some officials are annoyed by him, but he doesn't scare easily.

Still, with the future of his newspaper at stake, Crews is taking the threat seriously. The paper has never missed a publication date in the 23 years he has been there, and it has served as an important watchdog of local government, in the best tradition of community newspapers.

All that is reason enough to be troubled by the action of the judge in the Crews case. But the potential damage to the public extends well beyond Glenn County and even beyond the Public Records Act itself.

If upheld, this ruling would fundamentally reorient the relationship between the people of California and those who represent them. It would require members of the public to put themselves at risk to learn about their own government. It would recast government agencies and elected officials as immune from public scrutiny rather than accountable through that scrutiny.

As the Public Records Act itself states: "The people of this state do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies which serve them." For that reason alone, Crews deserves to win and his paper to survive.

Jim Newton’s column appears Mondays. His latest book is "Eisenhower: The White House Years." Reach him at jim.newton@latimes.com or follow him on Twitter: @newton_jim.

The Poway deal gets fishier

I already knew that school boards hired lawyers to help them get away with violating the law, but in Poway they took this practice to a whole new level. This is the district that called kids "depraved" for cheating on tests.

The Poway deal gets fishier
By Felix Salmon
Reuters
SEPTEMBER 26, 2012

Remember Poway, and the exorbitant interest costs it was paying on its debt? At first glance, those costs were so huge because of the way the deal was structured: there were no interest or principal payments before 2033, and the final payments weren’t due until 2051.

In reality, however, there was something else going on as well: while Poway claimed to have only borrowed $105 million, they were lying about that: in fact, they borrowed $126 million, taking a $21 million kickback on top of the $105 million they were ostensibly borrowing.

As such, in reality they’re “only” paying $855 million of interest on a $126 million principal amount, rather than the $876 million of interest on $105 million in principal that we originally thought. But this is not a good thing. In fact, Will Carless — who’s been pushing this story hard, and has done a huge amount of work in reporting and explaining it — makes a very persuasive case that it’s illegal.

After all, the whole point of pushing the repayment dates back to 2033 and beyond was that Poway had already maxed out everything it was allowed to borrow before that. “When voters allow a school district to issue bonds,” Carless explains, “they set what appears to be a strict dollar limit on how much can be borrowed”. But somehow, that cap on the amount the district can borrow does not seem to be well defined. Somewhere along the way, definitions got fuzzy.

It should be pretty simple, this question of how much someone has borrowed: you just look at how much money they received when they did the borrowing. And to determine how much interest they’re paying, you take all the money they repay, and subtract that initial amount.

But Poway isn’t doing that. Instead, it’s defining the amount that it’s borrowing as the face value on the bonds. Set a bond with a low face value, and you get to borrow much more than face value, without going over the borrowing limit set by voters.

And that’s exactly what Poway did. By artificially jacking up the interest rate on the bonds — and the longest-dated bond, remember, had an interest rate of a whopping 7.2% — Poway managed sell the bonds at a substantial premium to par. That action, according to a formal letter filed by the California attorney general’s office, was not legal. The AG’s office didn’t prosecute Poway, on the grounds that doing so would cause Poway to incur substantial litigation costs. But it explicitly said that Poway’s behavior was unlawful, and that if this kind of thing became a habit, then it might indeed end up being prosecuted.

What’s more, if Poway sold these bonds at 120 cents on the dollar, there’s no way it could buy them back at 105 cents or less, as I suggested a few weeks ago: unwinding this deal is going to be expensive. Not $850 million expensive, of course, but tens of millions of dollars all the same. I was going on the fact that Bondview shows the bonds trading at about 101 cents on the dollar, but there might be something weird going on there.

In any case, the more we learn about this Poway bond, the smellier it gets. And of course officials aren’t talking:

“The simple fact is that [Poway Unified] did not borrow any more funds than those approved by the voters,” Superintendent John Collins wrote in an email on August 29.

Collins wouldn’t elaborate on this position. He and the Poway school board did not respond to several requests for interviews. Nor did Poway officials agree to interviews with their legal or financial staff.

Well done to Carless for pushing on this; I hope his piece causes enough of a stir that Poway is going to be forced to answer for its actions in some forum. But in the meantime, it would be great to get some clarity on which bonds in particular ended up selling at well above par, and where those bonds are trading today. If, that is, they’re trading at all.

Secrecy in schools--and in the media

The authors below seems to agree with the things I said in "Free the Union-Tribune 5!"

\
The Educated Reporter
Commentary on education coverage, writing and a few other things
Linda Perlstein
December 7, 2009

Everything that’s wrong with us, Part Two. The biggest barrier to excellent education journalism has nothing to do with the institutional weaknesses of that clunky old mainstream media. Rather, it lies within the schoolhouse doors. And the boardroom doors. And the superintendent’s office doors.

Educators operate in a culture of fear.

Schools bar access to reporters, and that is a problem. Always has been. Worse, though, is the paranoia that prevents anyone, from the top on down, from speaking honestly about what works and doesn’t in education, what policy might look like (or does look like) in action. If I were a principal and politicians were visiting my school, I would show them the worst things in the building, so they could see our challenges. I would allow my teachers to speak with the press, without prepackaged messages to deliver. I would be starkly frank with my own bosses. But these days, there is no incentive for such honesty...

So teachers only tell their principals what they want to hear, principals tell their superintendents what they want to hear, superintendents tell their boards what they want to hear, all the way up to the national policy makers. Given that calculus, of course, the truth that makes its way to the vast majority of journalists is varnished to a glow.

Education is a secretive world. (Not convinced? Think about the fact that we have built an entire system around the results of tests that in most states nobody outside the classroom is allowed to see.) But with access and honesty comes greater understanding. For ages, the Washington Post had so little access to D.C. schools that they only covered the district as the inept bureaucracy it largely was...There was blame enough for everyone: central office, school administrators, parents, Jonathan himself.

... Superintendents tell me that because they can control their own message through electronic media, they don’t “need” journalists anymore. That scares the crap out of me, and it should scare you too.






To Write About Curriculum, Reporters Need Classroom Access
By Mary Ann Zehr
Edweek
December 7, 2009

A former reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer remarked to my colleague Lesli Maxwell that for journalists to better cover classroom issues in schools, they need to have better access to classrooms. Lesli included the views of Dale Mezzacappa in a story about a report by the Brookings Institution that documents a lack of education stories on the front pages of mainstream newspapers nationwide. The report also concludes that education gets scant attention in the top news stories produced by radio and television reporters.

Mezacappa's remarks resonated with me because I've found that the ability I have to provide examples of how a school's curriculum plays out in the classroom depends on whether I'm permitted to spend a lot of time observing in classrooms.

I sometimes find it difficult to convince school administrators that when I visit a school, I want to spend at least a whole day observing students and teachers, rather than taking a tour of the school and mostly interviewing administrators. With observation, I can identify examples to show how a curriculum is implemented. See this story I wrote about summer philosophy classes to get a sense of examples I gleaned from a day of observation. And even in this policy story about Striving Readers, a federal adolescent-literacy program, I was able to provide a classroom example at the end of the story because Chicago public schools gave me good access to classrooms during a site visit.

The Brookings Institution report decries the lack of news coverage of curriculum.

One way that school officials might be able to urge reporters to take a greater interest in curriculum is to invite them to observe in classrooms.

Lowell Billings and the CVESD board can't get off the merry-go-round

Most schools use public money to improve. CVESD uses public money to make things worse. They use the money to pay lawyers to cover up wrongdoing.

But Lowell Billings and Castle Park Elementary teachers want me to stop telling the public that they have used $100,000s of taxpayer dollars to keep Castle Park Elementary circling the drain for the past seven years.

Nothing would please me more than to be able to say that Billings and the CVESD board are doing the right thing.

Here's how CVESD can stop my complaints without paying a dime:

All Billings and the board have to do is to stop the coverup and start dealing with the felony-serious problems at the district, the teachers union, and Castle Park Elementary.

Simply replace the corrupt culture at CVESD with a culture that values honesty, the rule of law, and the education of children.

And then you and the teachers at Castle Park Elementary can get off the merry-go-round of lies, attacks, and dysfunction that you have been riding for the past seven years.

Do school boards have to allow free speech?

Posted November 20, 2006

Click HERE for original post.

Schools may boot critical speakers
By RENA HAVNER / Mobile (AL) Register Staff Reporter
November 19, 2006

The Mobile County school board is considering a new meetings policy that would expel a speaker who attacks "any citizen's good name," and possibly bar that person from addressing the board again for a year.

That would include anyone who criticized a school board member, said the policy's sponsor, Hazel Fournier.

Elected government officials who want to enact policies that prohibit criticism against them. In America. What good did it do for Gorbachev to tear down the wall? The communists are here. These board members deserve high criticism since they can't possibly have "good names."

"When we have a public meeting, why should I allow (someone) to come up and say how worthless Hazel Fournier is?" she said last week.

This comes just weeks after a representative of the local teachers union criticized Fournier and fellow board member Judy Stout in an open meeting, prompting Fournier to walk out of the room.

School board attorney Jim Atchison said that at first glance, Fournier's proposal seems legitimate and that the new provisions would help the board maintain control at meetings.

But some others question whether the changes would stifle free speech.

"These rules, frankly, go beyond anything I have seen in my years of handling media questions," said Dennis Bailey, a Montgomery-based attorney for the Alabama Press Association.

"You can't say something critical about somebody who works for the school board? That goes against the First Amendment."

Fournier said she doesn't mind if people criticize actions of the elected board. She just doesn't want any of the five board members called out by name.

The board for decades has had a policy that prohibits anyone from discussing the "character, reputation or good name of an individual." In the past, if someone mentioned a name, sometimes even in a positive light, that person would be asked to refrain from doing so.

Adding penalties

What's new about Fournier's proposal are the possible penalties.

Fournier presented the changes at a board meeting Tuesday. The board voted to send the revised policy out for public review and will decide whether to adopt the changes at a future meeting.

"I think it's necessary to protect the board, so that we don't provide a public forum for people to attack citizens," Fournier said.

In general, public officials are less protected by law than private citizens from critical or even defamatory speech.

Fournier said she's a citizen as much as she is a public official. She said that if someone wants to criticize her or another board member, they should do it privately.

Who made that rule? People who make decisions that affect the public should be criticized in public when they err.

"I am a citizen first," Fournier said. "I was voted into this position as a citizen of a community. When I leave the board, I will be a citizen."

That's not a rationale.

At an Oct. 28 meeting, Wade Perry, a director of the Mobile County Education Association, questioned why Stout, who was running for re-election at that time, would not say how she planned to vote on Superintendent Harold Dodge's contract.

Perry then accused Fournier of trying to oust the superintendent to get back at him for the impeachment of former board member David Thomas Jr., an ally of Fournier.

Perry recently said he opposes the proposed revisions to the public participation policy and that he doubts the new penalties would hold up in court.

"If they want to be criticized less, they should make better decisions," Perry said. "As long as they're making bad decisions, people should be able to stand up and criticize them for making bad decisions."

The Mobile County Education Association sued the school board in 2004 for shutting down a meeting when a teacher stood up and criticized the board for the amount of paperwork that teachers must complete.

Felt threatened

Board members testified in court that they felt threatened when members of the audience, mostly female teachers, applauded and cheered the speaker, then-Dixon Elementary School teacher Cindy Naylor.

The board stopped the meeting and scheduled it to reconvene the next morning, when the teachers would be in class.

Mobile County Circuit Court Judge Joseph "Rusty" Johnston ruled in favor of Naylor and the association, saying that the board had no right to stop her from speaking.

In his opinion, Johnston stated that the Constitution does not require public bodies to open the floor for public comment at meetings. But once the floor is open, "then those members of the public are exercising constitutionally protected rights."

By opening the floor to discussion, a government entity has created "limited public forum," Johnston wrote, and "its ability to regulate speech within that forum is therefore circumscribed."

That's the law.

The board's current public participation policy allows people to speak to the board on a topic for up to five minutes. Speakers must sign in prior to the meeting, and they are also asked to list the topic of their discussion.

At a meeting in March, the public participation policy was used to prevent a local business owner from voicing support for Dodge.

Tony Moore, owner of the Spot of Tea restaurant, approached a podium to speak about the superintendent. Then-board President Lonnie Parsons told Moore that he was not allowed to talk about an individual.

That's a violation of constitutional rights.

Later in the same meeting, the board voted to begin searching for a new superintendent who would replace Dodge. The board rescinded that vote a few weeks later, following a public outcry.

The Dodge issue came up before the board again this past Tuesday, with the board voting again to search for a new superintendent. The board's choice would replace Dodge on Jan. 1, 2008.

On Tuesday, local activist Robert Battles addressed the board about Dodge, being careful not to mention the superintendent by name.

Battles mentioned the name of President Bush, but then came back and apologized for accidentally saying a name.

Baldwin policy

The Baldwin County school board's public participation policy allows members of the audience who sign up to speak for up to three minutes.

"Historically, the board has always asked for common courtesy regarding remarks, but there's no policy mandating how those comments be made," said Terry Wilhite, spokesman for Baldwin schools.

The Mobile City Council's public comment policy requires people to sign up prior to speaking and allows them to speak for up to five minutes. The only written stipulation is that the person must speak on something involving city government.

Atchison, who had been an attorney for the city of Mobile, said last week that he hadn't fully read Fournier's changes to the policy. He said that the purpose seemed to be to make sure that speakers do not act recklessly.

"I'd think you can be able to control the meeting and that someone would be able to give up the right to come if they break the rules," he said. "There's got to be certain control."

Atchison said that the right to speak is "not unlimited."

"If you get into individuals and start pointing and attacking how an individual handles things, I think it's out of order and not conducive to an orderly meeting," Atchison said, adding that it's the board's meeting, not the public's meeting.

It's the public's board. It's not out of order to criticize public officials. In fact, it's very much in order. The First Amendment was added to the constitution knowing that government officials would soon outlaw criticism if they got the chance.

"The public has a right to be present, and the right to address issues is provided to them. You do so within the rules of that body," Atchison said.

You do so within the constitutional rules of the body.

Bailey said a public body can set reasonable restrictions on public comments made at meetings. But, he said, "You can't open the forum up for public comment only that it's favorable to members of the body," Bailey said. "Certainly people have been asked to leave for speaking out of turn or for shouting or being violent. That's certainly happened before.

"But to tell somebody to leave because they say something critical of a government official or mention a name -- I've just never heard of that."

If the proposed policy is adopted, the school district should be immediately sued.