2026 School Board Transitions to Ludington Opaques

[XLFD]

Ludington's school mascot has been the 'oriole' for at least 90 years, most of us living in or near Ludington grew up hearing their sports teams called simply the Ludington O's as a substitution for the full name, a practice the school actively approves of.  Symbolically, their administrators and board incorporate a big orange 'O' onto letterheads and paraphernalia encircling an Oriole to represent the Ludington Area School District (LASD):

When the LASD recently developed a robotics program, the community was amused that the program was called the Ludington O-bots, but the people in the district haven't been happy with the latest team sport name that has been embraced by the district's administrators and board trustees and consists of them: the Ludington O-paques.  

A brief aside:  We often hear the political concept of transparency referencing the degree of ability of a government body to get their information and records out to the public they serve and conduct their public actions out in the open.  Transparency is a virtue when one considers a public body's abilities, so it feels strange to talk of transparency when you need to criticize a public body's lack of it.  

Saying that a devout racist does not love all black people is less accurate than saying that they hate all black people.  Saying a public body is lacking transparency would also leave an incomplete picture without having a good antonym for transparency.  Secrecy is often used, but it's not a great opposite term in this regard as it indicates some sort of conscious attempt to thwart detection-- which isn't often the case with smaller public bodies who may lack resources to be as open as they want to be.  

The Ludington Torch will be coining and regularly using the term 'opacity' (the quality of being opaque, literally the ability to let light shine through) to refer to the ability of public bodies with adequate resources to provide a high degree of transparency in a convenient and consistent manner but fail or refuse to do so.  It is our opposite of transparency, and we are proud to introduce the lingo during 2026's Sunshine Week.  

The LASD has traditionally had their big orange 'O' stand for 'Open' in many ways, and that's why it's been a sad journey to see them have that infrastructure degraded despite having a recent trustee come in (Alan Neushwander) supposedly committed to transparency and on record working for that cause.  This came to a fore during the extended collective bargaining scrapes with the teacher's union which led to the resignation of the superintendent and finance director in early December 2025.  Revelations that deception, book-cooking, and other opaque shenanigans were entrenched in the administration building and allowed by the school board have not been successfully dissipated amidst the community.

And it appears only to be getting worse.  At the February 16 board meeting, this reporter made a statement as to what I was seeing:

XLFD:  "Early in December, the business manager and superintendent resigned under fire and an interim superintendent was hired.  One might expect given such a scenario, that the December board meeting two weeks later might be a little chaotic and not have a complete or well-organized agenda packet.  The board had enough information given to them to decide five action items, but the public had an agenda packet empty of everything other than an agenda. 

Come January's meeting, the agenda packet was just a two-page agenda, nothing else provided to the public, while the board decided three action items.  This meeting the pattern basically continues, with an agenda packet supplemented only with the script to be used for passing the six action items.  Presumably, the board has been apprised with some sort of supplementary packet that presents a revised committee meeting schedule, the actual school year budget amendments, a copy of the master bargaining agreement with LEA, and the actual competitive bids made by multiple companies for middle school roof repair and the middle school auxiliary gym floor. 

The public sees nothing other than the scripted motions, so the public is in the dark coming into this meeting about budget amendments, committee schedules, bargaining agreements, and whether administrators obeyed district policy in narrowing the roof and flooring bids down to a choice of one.  This is not transparency or accountability; it is a regression towards keeping the public in the dark about district policy and expenditures.  I hope that any trustee interested in keeping the public well-informed as every school board member should, at a time when the public is very distrustful of the district because of an incredibly significant accounting error, would make sure this oversight is not repeated in the future. [END comment]

My presentation was impactful enough to have a couple of board trustees contact me after the meeting to assure me that they hadn't been aware of the oversight and that the issue would be corrected in the future and the interim superintendent would be on it.  I took them at their word, figuring that they had a vested interest in correcting the mistake of keeping the public out of their business.

But yesterday, the first day of Sunshine Week, they cancelled their regularly scheduled meeting due to the blizzard, and the meeting had this simple and incomplete agenda packet.  This was not what was promised, it was worse, and it has moved the LASD's Opacity Index (Oi!) to higher than both other county public schools.  

Let's look at an example of why this is so opaque when compared to packets of prior school years.  The script for approving a winning bid for transportation building roof replacement is above.  Nowhere in the packet is what businesses bid on the project and what their proposals consisted of and their price.  Looking at this, my cynical side is presuming they're planning on wasting a lot of money and keeping us in the dark, probably overlooking more-deserving local companies in order to hire a company that might offer unnecessary flourishes or kickbacks.  Does anyone honestly believe the trustees would not have had all of that information in front of them at yesterday's meeting while you were left completely in the dark because of some unknown administrator who planned for that? 

This used to be open and shared to the general public for years, but they're hiding it now.  I'm trying not to use the term 'secrecy' at this point because remember, that term I'm preserving for intentionally hiding what should be public information rather than doing so because of laziness or lack of resources.  What I am saying, however, is that it is unacceptable to have continued backsliding in transparency when the public deserves more sunlight than ever coming from school administrators.  

The public deserves and needs a complete agenda by this Friday, as they have postponed the meeting to this coming Monday.  But since this reporter has to read the riot act to the Ludington City Council that night at 6 PM, this article will be published and find its way into their e-mailbox later today as more of a demand rather than a plea for the information we all deserve.