LASD Board Meeting, November 20, 2023: The Banished and the Bullied

[XLFD]

The agenda packet for the November 20, 2023 meeting of the Ludington Area School District (LASD) Board only had two actions by the board to take place, both mostly ceremonial and non-controversial in nature, so it was an opportune time to bring forth an issue that should be very controversial and addressed by the board using their established rules.  

With Trustee Sarah Lowman absent, the board listened to their auditor's financial report (HN Financial report LASD 2023) presented by their own financial wiz, Laura Jacobs.  Auditor Hungerford/Nichols could not send an agent until next month, so Jacobs gave her best interpretation of the audit to the board and it would be later approved as one of the action items (erroneously labeled the 23/24 report on the agenda) without issue.

Highlights of the report was the capitalization of the new elementary school at $19.1 million (it's construction was more than twice that) and the school's net position increased by $3.4 million.  The pension and OPEB plans show a major deficit, but it isn't seen as much of a problem since most other districts have the same issue.  Superintendent Kyle Corlett suggested bidding out auditing services for next year without any disapproval of that action by the board.

Student Jack Jubar wasn't present to give his report from the student's perspective, but Principals Steve Forsberg and Frank Marietta gave a brief presentation on Professional Learning Communities (PLC) in the LASD.  If you don't know exactly what a PLC is and why it's important, we're with you at the Ludington Torch.

Public comments at meetings like these are very important and the first speaker, Jason Wolven, tried to express that to the board, saying effectively that the board's inability to summarize comments by the public was contrary to the Open Meetings Act and limited the value of their minutes.  While the district's minutes policy does not explicitly violate the OMA, it is a great question that remains unanswered to the public.

Past LASD boards summarized public comments (see here, here, and here for that practice in three recent school years) and their authors, the board never adopted a policy to change that and so the violation of the OMA is not that they no longer do that, but that they made a decision to change a standing board policy without board approval at a meeting open to the public.  

A board that has moved secretly from a position of openness (recording comments in a meeting) to a position of closedness (muting the public) is one that is bound to do other things in secret and in clear opposition to the rules.  That is what I brought to the table this meeting in discussing an incident that led to an unlawful banishment of a district's mother from all athletic events (including practices) for the rest of the school year. 

I've gotten the records of this incident, and I'm still trying to find a bylaw of the schools she violated or a law of the city or state that she has, but all I have seen is constitutionally protected speech and needless escalation by school officials and employees.  Here is the comment I made, perhaps if I left off the self-deprecating intro I could have finished all of it, and some snippets of the police report about it with the mom's name hidden by purple rectangles.  Her name is not important here, the principles are, and so I would appreciate in the comments to this article that respondents respect her privacy at this point, even if they know who it is. 

XLFD:  "We should all be thankful this holiday week.  I'm thankful, along with several others, that over the course of the last month, I was a candidate for both an open seat on the county commission and the Ludington City Council, and 6 commissioners followed by 6 councilors chose another candidate and gave me votes enough to be counted with zero hands.  The reason I'm thankful for that is that I can come to school board meetings, state my thoughts, and not have anybody claim that I am talking on behalf of the county or the city.  Everyone here wins.

I will, however, as myself, speak in opposition of a policy that banned a mother from attending all Oriole athletic events for the rest of the year without any sort of due process.  School Resource Officer Gallihugh's report is fairly clear in showing that.  After Gallihugh was told by the complaining mother that the banned mother "never assaulted anyone and was only being vulgar and disruptive towards her" and some 12 year old kids at football practice the prior night,

he took it upon himself to be judge, jury and executioner, by writing up a "letter of trespass" and have Principal Hart sign it. 

Gallihugh said it was "due to the escalating situation" between the mother and the students, so that she would be "trespassed from all Ludington athletic events for the remaining school year".  The mother was contacted telling her about the decision before even being asked for her side of the story.  Additional investigation after this punishment was doled out to a mother accused of being disruptive, seems to indicate that the people who should be held to task are two coaches for the district, Jeremy Vronko and Matt Murphy.  

Vronko admits when he is finally interviewed two days later that he got into the mother's face and screamed "you got to go" as loud as he could.

This simple assault was discussed with the police chief and superintendent, along with the mother's claim of her child being bullied and seems to have been ignored simply because of the coach's position and the mother's lack of position.  Coach Murphy's version of events is so much different than the three other versions from both moms and the other coach, and indicates that his version is non-factual.  But Coach Murphy is on the same police team as Gallihugh, so the conflicting stories are never questioned.  

I see a Ludington coach escalating a situation, I see another coach lying about what happened, and the only person set to miss the rest of Oriole sports for the rest of the season is a mother who was concerned that school personnel were not taking her claims of her child being bullied seriously, and who has subsequently been bullied by the school district without any kind of due process. (here I was called for time, I would have continued...) 

 Remember, she was banned from all school athletic events on the word of another mother that admitted she was at most disruptive and a vulgar for using the phrase "talking shit" in front of kids who can watch movies and read books with much worse language without adult supervision.  This board needs to remind your superintendent, your principals, and your SRO that they cannot summarily ban a mother from all sporting events for a year before she receives due process from the district.  They are creating a liability and this board needs to take action.  [END Comment]

The next day I sent an email to the board members, sharing the letter of trespass and the police report and went into greater detail about the issue of her rights guaranteed under the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment being abridged by the actions of the LASD SRO and Principal Hart, why their concurrent lack of inaction against Coach Vronko highlighted those violations, and lack of any conceivable rule or reason to trespass a parent from her child's athletic events.  

For nothing in the police report and interviews with those present suggest this mother said anything beyond her chiding another mother, her son and a few others for bullying her son by "talking shit" about her son and her family.  The same school district that permits 11-12 year old students to read any of the many adult-themed and adult-illustrated books from the local library without their parent's knowledge, is now saying that "talking shit", a verb used to express succinctly an aspect of bullying, will hurt their young ears and disrupt a break in their football practice.  

Coach Jeremy Vronko, SRO Conor Gallihugh and Principal Mike Hart showed exactly the LASD's policy on bullying by how they mistreated this mother trying to broker peace between her child and others when the school abrogated that responsibility by their past actions and resolution of this incident. 

They will be the bullies and they will make their own rules.  Screw the school board who normally decides whether a student will be suspended from school activities after going through a fact-finding process, and have no process defined at all for parents who have been accused of violating some actual rule in place.  These people overstepped their authority, and if the victim follows through as I encourage her to do, they will pay for it.  

The last person to comment was in support of the school forest skills park to be created by the Shoreline Cycling Club, and this topic was briefly discussed favorably by the board later on, but not acted upon yet.  The board did approve $1.6 million in bond spending for improvements to the MS/HS complex, and recognized Ashela Trevino as the Soaring Oriole for the month.  

[Willy]

Thanks for the post and information. You are correct about PLC or Professional Learning Communities. What bunch of nonsense. After reading the link you posted on PLC's it makes sense why our education system is so screwed up. The opening paragraph of the link explaining what a PLC is can only lead a rational person to believe that our schools are being infiltrated by nit wits who know nothing about the profession of being an educator. 

Professional learning community (PLC)

  An ongoing process in which educators work collaboratively in recurring cycles of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve. Professional learning communities operate under the assumption that the key to improved learning for students is continuous job-embedded learning for educators.

How can educated people make such an ignorant statement? I'm not talking about all teachers because there were and still are plenty of terrific educators out there but they are being forced to embrace this kind of nonsense. The basics of a good education has not changed since Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Those kinds of teachers still exist but are being muffled and stymied by the Woke agenda and the Left. 

I did some research on how and what  the old 1 room schools taught and was quite surprised at how much the children  were immersed in what would be considered the real basics of education. Some very old relatives in my family who attended 1 room schools told of how good the education was that they received. Some of whom became scientists, engineers and other highly accomplished professionals. Their education was unique and rewarding. New buildings, fake grass and weird agendas are not a formula for a solid education.

 

[XLFD]

I was in the teaching profession for the better part of two decades (as a graduate assistant, associate professor, tutor, and substitute teacher) and seen a fair share of theoretical topics in education that I tried my hardest to digest, but would always come to the conclusion that it was just a bunch of jargon being thrown around by 'experts' in the field that meant nothing but sounded very highbrow and unassailable.  I'm reminded of the term "psychobabble" a word used to describe theoretical psychology that appears to say and imply a lot, but really means nothing once you dissect it.  At the time, I called it edubabble, and in remembering this for my reply to you Willy, I wondered whether the term had ever been coined before and found out that it did indeed have a wikipedia entry.

As you note, a good teacher doesn't need to know any of this crap about PLCs or other popular educational topics, they are often hindered in their core job by trying to follow the latest fad in Pop Ed.

[Willy]

Works for me.