The school board AND The Tale of The Tape
The advent of digital media has been a great thing for our culture. It’s been a big help — almost a savior — for suspects and cops alike during traffic stops and other criminal justice interactions. It’s been a great help in holding lying politicians’ feet to the fire. It’s tough to deny saying something when we can all point to video of you saying it.
We’re betting Moore County Board of Education vice-chairman Shannon Davis wishes digital video did not exist. Madame Davis was first elected to the board as part of a conservative, power-to-the-parents ticket. That ticket won convincingly and took a 6-1 majority on the board.
It didn’t take long for Madame Davis to decide her best move was to do whatever the superintendent wants – no questions asked. Oversight — being the eyes and ears of the voters and taxpayers – be damned.
(Please deny this, Shannon. You are on tape doing a lot of talking.)
Well, another round of elections has passed. The conservative majority dropped down to 4-3 from 6-1. Madame Davis changed sides and got rewarded with the worthless vice chairman post.
The new board is now embroiled in a controversy over — all things — book reports. The old 6-1 majority approved a measure requiring students complete a minimal number of book reports in order to graduate.
The demons and howler monkeys on the left and, more specifically, within the public school establishment screamed bloody murder. MICROMANAGEMENT, they hollered. (Never mind all the DEI and Marxist-Leninist-Black Lives Matter-LGBTQXYZ nonsense that has been getting pushed on our kids via the public school bureaucracy.)
The superintendent was vehemently opposed to book reports. So, Davis decided she would be too.
This brings us to a recent Tweet from a local conservative watchdog group. The tweet provided snippets of video from the book report repeal debate.
Submission: Who’s telling the truth? Let’s take a look at the evidence. ?
Start at the top left of the video collection and work your way clock-wise. (Remember to un-mute each video. Muted is the default setting.) Video ONE features a taxpayer during the public comment section of a recent school board meeting. The taxpayer alleges Davis fabricated a story about a veteran teacher having a nervous breakdown in front of her about having to assign book reports.
Video TWO features Davis denying that she ever told that story — and even throwing in a few Scripture quotes to try and shame the taxpayer for daring to bring this up.
Keep moving clockwise to Video THREE. THAT video features footage of Davis telling the exact story the taxpayer said she did — and she denied telling in video TWO.
Ain’t digital video grand?
This stuff isn’t just in Moore County. Our conservative school board revolution movement fell flat too.
Conservatives running for school boards need to remember 1) that the superintendent will almost certainly be your enemy, and 2) the superintendent is your employee, NOT your boss. Superintendents routinely toe the woke education establishment line and get their panties in a twist when anything is proposed that does not fit that agenda.
The reason superintendents do this is the career path of superintendents. Their path upward to more prestigious and better paying superintendent jobs is to move to bigger systems. Since historically, the bigger systems have been more liberal, they do not want anything that looks conservative on their resume or that can be found by anyone researching their career.. What is needed for school boards are strong individuals who understand they will not be the superintendent’s buddy if they are going to faithfully serve the public, and there will be times they are going to have to remind the superintendent forcefully that he/she is employee and they are the elected policymakers. Anyone without the backbone to do that should not be serving on a school board.
Those who brownnose their local superintendent ought to be run out of office on a rail. They are a big part of the problem in education. This woman clearly fills those shoes. Superintendents never really give a damn about any school system, its students, or its parents. All they ever really care about is building their resume for that next job.
If parents haven’t figured things out by now, they never will. Schools today fail on every front from my days in school (I’m 84). I’m ashamed of those who call themselves conservatives (seems to be a misnomer these days!!) and yet abandon every single great teaching tool that worked from explicit phonics, English grammar, reading of classic literature, math facts unchanged throughout centuries, civics, geography and American history.
So….if a parent today cannot pull their children out of these progressively controlled dumbed- down schools, and homeschool them or find a decent traditional curriculum to teach them, do this: turn off the tv, computers and cell phones and set a reading challenge. Have them read a variety of books of interest and give oral or written book reports for your children before they can do what they want to do. Summer is a great time to get kids to read. There are plenty of great books to challenge them with. The more parents remove their children from the current obtuse gov’t control, the
happier they and you will be. America never had a literacy problem in her history until the past 50/60 years. That should tell EVERYONE WE HAVE A PROBLEM.
Ms Davis is another sad case of someone who supposedly had traditional values, only to lose them to the iron fist in the velvet glove controls of the superintendent! We don’t need school board elections as they do not work. We need to restore the power of appointment by those winning elections as commissioners, to pick the best people they know and appoint them to the school board. That gets politics out schools, as many top qualified people will never seek to enter a political race to serve on a board.
I agree with you on what we should be emphasizing in our classrooms. I also agree that more times than not parents should choose other options to public schools, and that parents should set the educational tone within the family unit. It should be noted that a good number of family units may not be able to accomplish that because of the appalling condition of the modern-day American family these days. Some may only have the public-school option.
The idea about county commissioners appointing school board members may well work in your county, but I suspect it would not in my abysmally ethically challenged county. For example, my county has two pairs of school board members with spouses on the county commission. On co-related matters they vote in lockstep and never recuse themselves. We also have two school board members with family members on the fast track within the school system. One school board member checks both boxes.
Over the last two election cycles we have knocked off two long serving Democrat school board members. There is only one Democrat left. During this span five new Republicans have been elected. Only two of the five have remained true to conservatism and have not fallen under the spell of the Superintendent. Board wise that pits two against seven on most major issues of contention. In the meantime, our local Repub RINOs are working overtime to primary our conservative minorities on both boards. In other words, the Democrats are not our worst obstacle to good government. In fact, they are only relevant insomuch as their collusion with their RINO collaborators.
Yeah, it’s pretty depressing.
Local school boards appear to have little influence over the local school board policies. The North Carolina School Board Association has more influence than local boards. Two or more times per year an agenda item appears on board meeting agendas. It typically appears as an action item to update or revise local board policies to conform with the NCSBA “recommendations.” Some recommendations reflect changes made by the legislature to various statutes applicable to public education.
Other NCDPI recommended changes to local policies are based upon rulings from the NCDPI. A discussion regarding the applicability of these policy changes are typically led by the superintendent or designee, not the elected chairman of the school board. The presentation of recommended local policy revisions goes unchallenged as the voice of the superintendent adds authority to the pronouncements. Thus, there is minimal discussion prior to voting to accept the NCSBA or NCDPI ordered revisions.
If one looks at local school board policies posted on-line in each counties school board website, you will find that most local policies are word-for-word identical, the only difference being the name of the county. Beaufort county citizens worked for over a year to have the local board to change one policy. That was policy Code 3100, Curriculum Development. The citizens demanded that DEI, CRT, and Common Core Math be eliminated from any course of instructional material utilized throughout the county.
Local school boards in NC can tinker with minor changes with some policies, but any major changes will be challenged by board attorneys or NCDPI.
The NC School Boards Association is a major liberal player in the leftwing education establishment in our state. Conservatives should take whatever they put out with a grain of salt. Our statutes give local school board local control if they will assert it, but it is groups like the NCSBA that try to keep them under NCDPI’s woke thumb. It would be great if conservative school boards created a rival organization of school boards which do exercise local control and do not want to be Raleigh’s puppets.
I wonder what local school districts pay to the North Carolina School Board Association in order to employ their lawyers that do this work for lazy school boards, and wine and dine fat and sassy self-important school board members at their retreats?
Want to see a dysfunctional, catastrophic failure, look no further than Beaufort Co.
2 sets of husband/wives on school board and commissioner.
Want to see Super run, manage and roughshod BOE, we have the model/case study, Bd kowtows and works for Super; who sits in the middle, surrounded by members and has full reign of mtgs. Most recent school closure public mtg; HE was SOLE speaker and members, IF THERE, were disbursed and hidden in crowd. Super spent first half of entire mtg telling why school should be closed and when open forum was finally “OPENED”, asked that no negative comments about closing be presented. Yes, this was in the USA.
jwmson: The examples I gave previously were about Beaufort County, too. I’ve never seen anything like that board. The Superintendent sits dead center with his secretary on the right and the puppet Chairman on his left. The two conservatives are on the periphery, one with a pole blocking him from the official camera and making it necessary for news media to film him from the rear or from afar at a very bad angle. Obviously, a lot of thought was put into the seating arrangements. That board has got to be the textbook case for lack of transparency and mega manipulation.
I think the two conservative Beaufort County School Board members need to meet with the conservative Moore County School Board member to compare notes.