We Have a Serious Problem
I am still processing the hours of public comment during last night’s meeting. At the end of the meeting, I was exhausted and voted to skip closing comments so that we could all get home and go to sleep. I was outvoted and given three minutes to speak. These are my closing thoughts from the meeting:
As I have said many times before, in order to fix problems, we have to be honest about those problems and give them sunlight. Covering up our problems and sweeping them under the rug has gotten us to where we are today, having to close schools due to decades of facilities neglect, and having a high school yearbook, which should be a celebration of the achievements of our students, filled with divisive politically charged, factually incorrect rhetoric.
We are a school district. Our job is not to raise social justice warriors. Our job is to educate children. To give them baseline knowledge so that they can function as productive adults in society.
It is not our role to feed children propaganda, but I see it even in our youngest grades, and I feel helpless to stop it.
It is widely accepted in education now, both public and private, to pump kids full of activist rhetoric.
The cultural revolution is here and it does not end well for us.
I wanted us to have a public discussion about how to respond to a factually devoid antisemitic yearbook article, but my request to put the item on the agenda was rejected.
Instead, I was told it would be discussed in closed session, behind closed doors away from the eyes and ears of the public. Where we are prohibited by law from publicly sharing what was discussed.
The same thing has happened on multiple other occasions when I have asked to discuss controversial issues in public. This practice keeps important discussions and debates out of the public eye.
I am opposed to this use of closed sessions, and I will continue to raise my concerns about this practice until it stops.
Closed sessions are not meant to be a safe space for us to discuss policy issues. (“It should also be emphasized that the purpose of the exception is to permit the body to receive legal advice and make litigation decisions only; it is not to be used as a subterfuge to reach nonlitigation oriented policy decisions.” (71 Ops.Cal.Atty.Gen. 96, 104-105 (1988).) They are a very narrow exception to California’s open meetings laws, to be used only for a very specific limited purpose.
Transparency means we discuss controversial issues in public, where the community has the benefit of hearing all of our viewpoints. It is harder to mislead people when discussions are public, and it enables the voters to judge us on our actual positions rather than a PR campaign someone might use to mislead voters.
There is no excuse or justification for what was printed in the yearbook, and I am personally ashamed and embarrassed by it.
It raises significant concerns about judgment and the content of our curriculum, and we need to get PV education back on track so that we are teaching truth, facts, reality, and not social justice activism.
In social justice movements, there is a phrase: “Do the work.” It’s not the minority group’s job to educate others on the discrimination they face. It’s on everyone else to educate themselves and do the work to learn.
Not only are people not doing the work here—they are forcing the minority Jewish community to do the work for them. They’re forcing the minority Jewish community to beg to be recognized. While antisemites cheer and jeer in the same room. I’m just horrified.
I cannot believe that one of my colleagues made an antisemitic incident about her, and rallied supporters from outside the community to come and talk about what a victim she is. I’m shocked and disgusted, and I want to apologize to all of our Jewish community members who had to sit and listen to this tonight.
As always, this is one lady’s opinion. I don’t speak for the Board, and no one else speaks for me.
