Tag: Frankford High School

Board Blocks Students and Community Members from Speaking

APPS and PARSL members urge Board to bring back Certified Teacher Librarians. (Photo by Lisa Haver)

Board of Education Meeting:  June 29, 2023 

by Lisa Haver and Lynda Rubin

During this month’s meeting, APPS member Barbara Dowdall was detained by district security who told her she couldn’t go into the auditorium because she wasn’t on the speakers list.  (In May it was Lisa Haver, in April Ilene Poses.)  The board set up 96 chairs for this meeting in an auditorium with a 240-person capacity. When APPS wrote to the board about their setting up only 82 chairs in April, President Reginald Streater replied that they were “working with building management to address it”, as if building management staff could overrule the president of the board. When we wrote to him again in June because the board had barred people from attending because of the current speaker suppression policies, we received no reply. No matter how the board sets up its arbitrary number of chairs,  forcing people to stand, they cannot bar people from attending a public meeting. That is illegal. 

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Has the Board Made the District Better in Its First Five Years?

Preview: June 29, 2023 Board of Education Meeting

by Lisa Haver

uly 2023 marks five years since the reinstatement of the Board of Education after years of state control. Four of the nine original members still sit on the board.  What has the board accomplished in that time? Have they made education better for the city’s children? There are fewer school librarians than in 2018. Class size remains too high.  Standardized testing still determines where resources go and how students, teachers and schools are judged. Substandard charter schools continue to drain money, much of it for exorbitant CEO salaries. And when members of the public come to be heard on these and other issues, they find that the board’s speaker suppression policies bar them from speaking and give them a scant two minutes–if they are lucky enough to make the list. Recently, the board has actually barred members of the public from even entering the auditorium. What does the board tout as its biggest accomplishment? Goals and Guardrails, their new data system that labels schools “on-track” or “off-track”, and which they spend up to two hours analyzing every month.    

At this meeting, the board will vote on 104 official items and spend approximately $207, 084, 246. (Five items each cost $10 million or more, including Item 58 at $69 million.) Twenty-five of the items appear to be no-bid. Despite the number of items and the total costs, the board will still allow only 30 general speakers. 

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