Skip to main content

A Big Fat Nothing

I wrote on August 17th about the response of the PTACHC Board to BOE member Ann DeLacy's wild accusations. Remember that? They wrote a letter to the entire Board of Education and the Superintendent asking to open a dialogue about this issue.

Their letter is dated August 8th. Today is October 3rd, and there has been no response. Nothing.

 

If you want to refresh your memory about what Ms. DeLacy said, check this out.

At the first PTACHC meeting of the year, Board Members Ellen Giles and Sandra French brushed aside Ms. DeLacy's actions as unofficial as she was "clearly acting alone" and therefore her words carried no official weight. They also said the Board could not have responded to the PTACHC Board letter because the Board of Education doesn't meet over the summer.

Funny thing. Due to all this craziness at the BOE about Cindy Vaillancourt, we now know that just isn't true. The Board met on July 11th, and then again in August, after receipt of the PTACHC letter. And there is archived video footage to verify that. So they do meet in the summer.

But it seems that the Board was far too busy cooking up "condom-gate" to be bothered to respond to a letter from PTACHC, a parent advocacy organization which represents 26,000 members in Howard County.

The next meeting of PTACHC is Monday evening. I will be there. I look forward to talking to the members of my own school PTA before I go to see if they have any issues they would like me to raise.

It's bound to be an interesting meeting.

*****

PTACHC is sponsoring two candidate forums. Check them out here.

Sunday, October 12th, for Board of Education Candidates.

Sunday, October 19th, for County Executive Candidates.

 

 

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teacher Gifts

Today is the last day of school before the Winter Break. It’s a good time to remember the far-reaching nature of our public school system. You may not have children. You may have sent your children to independent schools. It matters not. You will be impacted one way or another. Yesterday I read a long thread on Facebook about several waves of illness in the schools right now. There’s influenza A and norovirus, I believe. And of course there’s COVID. Apparently in some individual schools the rate of illness is high enough for school admin to notify parents.  When I was little the acceptable holiday gift for a teacher was one of those lovely floral handkerchief squares. (I don’t know what it was for male teachers. They were rare in my elementary years.) These days the range of teacher gifts is wider and I have fond memories of Target gift cards which I have written about before. I think it’s safe to say that giving one’s teacher Influenza, norovirus, or COVID is not the ideal holiday...
1 comment
Read more

They Can Wait

This is not a typical Saturday post. That’s because, in my community, it’s not a typical Saturday.  Oakland Mills High School, after years of deferred repair, needs massive renovation. It’s pretty simple: when you don’t fix a problem it gets bigger. The school system itself said the the OMHS school building was  "no longer conducive to learning" back in 2018.  2018 .  But Thursday the Boad of Education voted to push it out of the lineup of important projects which will be given the go-ahead to proceed soonest.  In my opinion it’s a terrible decision and sets a dangerous precedent. To explain, here’s the advocacy letter I sent in support of Oakland Mills High School. I was rather proud of it. I am writing to ask you to proceed with needed renovation at Oakland Mills High School in the most timely and comprehensive manner humanly possible. I have read the letter sent to you by the Oakland Mills Community Association and I am in complete agreement. You are extremel...
1 comment
Read more

Separate and Unequal

  Remember “Separate but equal”? Remember how that really meant that Black schools languished in  broken-down buildings without adequate heat or toilet facilities, with cast-off, ragged learning materials, underfunded and largely ignored? The Supreme Court struck that down in 1954. The evidence was clear that separate was not equal. Plessy v Ferguson had led to - - no, endorsed - - deeply unequal schooling and opportunities. We tend to think of Brown v Board as being purely about racial integration. It was not.  It was about the logical consequences of segregation. And they were not, not, not equal. The ruling in 1954 didn’t transform public education for non-whites into a land of milk and honey by any means. But it articulated some essential truths in a way that made including everyone a legal precedent which could be relied upon and built upon. It was better than what came before it but it rested upon unsteady ground. It did not necessarily change the hearts or minds ...
1 comment
Read more