Open Letter to D-200 School Board

After attending last night's Board meeting I would like to offer the following suggestions:

Please provide a microphone for speakers who address the Board. They have their backs to the audience and they cannot be heard throughout the room.

Please speak toward and into your own microphones. Please pull the microphone closer to your mouth when you are speaking. We in the audience are there to hear what you are saying.

Please do not turn away toward a fellow board member and speak away from the microphone. When you do, your voice is not amplified and cannot be heard throughout the room.

Last night there were five students waiting to speak to the Board. It would have been a great courtesy on your part to put their topic on the agenda for the first of your two meetings.

If protocol requires you to place their topic far down on the Agenda, then a board member could make a motion to move it up.

When a parent makes an impassioned plea, such as regarding services to a special education student, it deserves more than "Thank you for coming tonight."

Does any board member send any electronic message to another board member during the meeting? When you have your laptops open and the screens facing away from the audience, we cannot see any emails or IMs sent among you. If you do so, you should be aware that is most likely a violation of the Open Meetings Act.

Was it really necessary to spend so much time considering millions of dollars in Life Safety Improvements (parking lots, telephone systems, tennis courts, etc.), after you spent so little time slashing jobs?

I know you to be caring, concerned members of the community, or you wouldn't be on the School Board. But the caring part gets lost in the picture, when the audience feels you care more about parking lots and tennis courts (by amount of time spent) than you do the students.

The Life Safety Improvements were explained as being funded by money that could not be used for staff or operating funds. Did dedicated funds require any District matching? In other words, if you didn't upgrade telephone systems throughout all the schools, didn't spend millions on asphalt, didn't add new tennis courts, would some District money be available for saving teaching positions?