PEORIA -- The Peoria District 150 School Board was live TV-free for its meeting on May 10.
Board chairwoman Debbie Wolfmeyer announced last month that a "consensus" agreed to discontinue the live broadcasts. Just when that "consensus" occurred is unknown, and likely involved a violation of the Illinois Open Meetings Act, since no public vote or discussion took place. Oh well, details....
Part of the May 10 meeting was videotaped for cable TV transmission a week later. That delay is a shame, as many of the announcements made at the meeting concerned events this week, before the news reaches the TV audience.
The 35-minutes of public comment was not videotaped, so the board in effect is censoring what the TV viewers will see next week. That's a shame, because the speakers had many valuable remarks concerning public policy.
These included former teachers union president Terry Knapp, noting that the district has spent $17 million on Edison schools and $25 million on "the program," which helped to erase the district's $61 million surplus in 1999, leaving it with a deficit for several years running. And still it continues to pay for outside programs and a charter school, he said.
"How many jobs and sales taxes would that (money) have given to Peoria?" he asked.
He noted a news report about how Wall Street is making money off charter schools. (There's also one in the New York Times.)
Sharon Crews, a retired teacher, noted that $200,000 going to pay for a Johns Hopkins program at Manual High School could instead have gone to finance summer school and the alternative school. She decried the situation that "the board decided to stifle public comments."
Teachers union president Bob Darling said 250 teachers are being let go, and only 150 openings will occur for them, as the district downsizes by closing Woodruff High School (which incidentally received a Key Club award from the Kiwanis Club, it was noted earlier in the meeting. Another tradition in Peoria gone.)
Thirty tenured teachers are still without jobs, he said.
Then he attacked the news media, and the Journal Star. "If you sneeze in the wrong direction, trust me the Journal Star will print it in the paper," he said.
Four others also spoke, including one woman, a former teacher elsewhere, who offered to help teachers learn how to include children with autism and ADHD. "Inclusion was a disaster for us," she said of her own family.
I recorded the public comments with an audio digital recorder. The file is posted here:
-- Elaine Hopkins
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