Ozark School Board censures one of their own!

GUEST COLUMN

The Ozark School Board just issued a public censure to one of their own.  Wow!  For an organization that swears they must always march in lockstep, never displaying the slightest hint of anything less than complete solidarity, this was a startling move. 

What terrible misconduct could have justified this? 

The current board president’s three DUIs? 

Another sitting board member’s criminal harassment incident? 

It couldn’t be a former board member’s physical assault of a fellow citizen, since he is no longer on the board.

  But since none of those resulted in even a verbal censure (not a public one anyway), the offense that prompted a written (and read aloud at the public board meeting) censure must have surpassed these in severity.  So, what was the gross offense?

What was the horrible offense?

Christina Tonsing, an elected member of the Ozark School Board who campaigned on a platform of integrity, transparency, and accountability TO THE PUBLIC THAT ELECTED HER, took it upon herself to invite the public to share with her any thoughts they had on the operations of our school district.  That is all.  That was the extent of her misconduct.  If you don’t believe me, read the reprimand yourself here: https://simbli.eboardsolutions.com/Meetings/Attachment.aspx?S=99&AID=303065&MID=13009.

A charitable interpretation of that document would be that it is not a reprimand at all.  It is merely a public disclaimer ensuring that everyone knows that she does not speak for the board in an official capacity when she talks to the public.  That’s fair, right?  After all, the board constantly reiterates to its members that no singular member of the board can act on behalf of the board.  All board actions must be the result of a board consensus.  That is all fair and good.  But here’s the problem.  First of all, she didn’t even talk to the public. 

She scheduled LISTENING sessions for the public to come speak with her.

  Second, ALL ELECTED OFFICIALS should be soliciting input from the public.

  And NONE OF THEM EVER speak for the entirety of the organization they are elected to. 

This is EXACTLY what we want from our elected officials. 

Third, this public disclaimer/reprimand was not a board-level action.  It was initiated by either a district administrator, the school attorney, or the board president.  NONE OF THEM have the authority to do so on their own.  That the superintendent and his staff (as it was still Dr. Bauman’s regime at the time) cannot reprimand a board member should be obvious. 

They have it all backwards…

After all, the board is SUPPOSED TO BE superior to the administration.  The attorney also lacks any legal authority.  Her job is merely to ADVISE the school district.  The board president presumably actually does have the authority to initiate a reprimand like this.  The problem is that if she does so on her own, then she is acting independently, without the backing of the board, and the board constantly insists that this is impermissible.  But since she is acting internally to the board – kind of, anyway – perhaps this is a different case and lies within her authority. 

The problem is that even if she has LEGAL standing for this, she lacks MORAL authority to censure someone for doing THE VERY SAME THING SHE HERSELF HAD JUST DONE.  Sarah Adams-Orr, the school board president, recently was a featured speaker at a forum organized by the Christian County MRA in which she was invited to talk about and field questions about the Ozark School Board.  So if it was wrong for Christina Tonsing to organize a LISTENING session with the public, then it was surely wrong for Sarah Adams-Orr to attend a public meeting to have a SPEAKING session about the Ozark School District.

I alleged that this public reprimand was initiated by either a district administrator, school attorney, or board president.  But if you look at the document, you will note that it bears the endorsement of the whole board (except for Christina Tonsing who declined to sign it).  These signatures were all obtained AT THE CONCLUSION of the school board meeting, well AFTER the reprimand had already been formulated and delivered.

The board is being manipulated!

  This was not brought for discussion before the board.  It was prepared unilaterally and then taken to the board members AFTER THE FACT for them to rubber stamp.  The board members have become so accustomed to doing as their told, signing on the dotted line wherever the big man tells them to, that not a single one of them recognized the gross impropriety of this reprimand.  Perhaps I am misinterpreting what I saw and heard.  Perhaps there was some kind of behind-the-scenes effort to obtain other board members’ approval beforehand and the signature part of it was just a formality delayed until after the board meeting. 

But the fact that the document has a spot for Christina Tonsing to sign her own reprimand is a pretty strong suggestion that if any effort to this effect happened, it wasn’t a formal board-level discussion.  And we still have that problem of whether the board president has any moral authority to initiate a reprimand of a board member for a lesser offense than what she herself had just committed.  (To be fair, in a sane world, both board members’ activities are to be encouraged.  But that doesn’t appear to be the world this board is operating in.  If what Christina Tonsing did was wrong, then the logic that condemns it has to judge Sarah Adams-Orr’s actions as even MORE WRONG.)

Why was a board member treated this way?

But wait, you might still think, we really haven’t yet established that it was a reprimand.  Perhaps it really was just a public disclaimer.  If so, where is the public disclaimer that Sarah Adams-Orr’s appearance as a featured panelist at a local political groups meeting was not as an official representative of the board?  Disclaimers are only issued where one feels there is worrisome conduct taking place.  Where is the public disclaimer that other board members’ public conversations don’t represent the board?  Of course there wasn’t one because this wasn’t really a mere disclaimer.

A disclaimer when no disclaimer is needed isn’t really a disclaimer.  It is an insinuation.  It is like saying, when a colleague discovers that his lunch has been stolen from the common fridge at work, “I’m not saying it was Christina Tonsing.”  No, you’re not saying that.  But you also didn’t name all of the other people who you aren’t saying didn’t do it.  You mentioned only the one person, which means your real intent was to associate that individual’s name with the event, without actually accusing them.

It is particularly funny when the event is a non-event.  It is an insinuation that something happened that didn’t happen.  It implies rogue behavior without directly stating it.

Disclaimers hold little value

Disclaimers are relatively impotent.  You can’t really relieve yourself of much responsibility by issuing a public disclaimer.  Imagine that there really was a danger that a board member talking to the public might say or hear something that thereafter puts the board in a legally vulnerable position.  (I can’t imagine what that might be, but please just indulge me for a moment of “make believe.”)  Presume that the aggrieved party then files a lawsuit against the district.  Could then district really respond with “Well, we announced at a board meeting and even hung on a hidden corner of our district website a statement that Christina Tonsing is merely one board member, not the whole board.” 

Does anyone think a judge would accept that as vindication for the board?  Not counting board members and district employees, the actual audience that saw that disclaimer could be counted on probably one hand (two, at most). 

There is no way this disclaimer was intended to inform the public.  It was issued in a quiet, poorly attended public meeting.  And that was sufficient, as its real purpose was to keep board members in line.

Whose interests does a reprimand like this serve?  It most obviously serves the interests of the superintendent and his fellow district administrators.  If board members start interacting with the public, then board members might get ideas about how to run the school that don’t come directly from the administrators themselves.  I can’t emphasize this point enough.  Schools are supposed to be run by their communities via the school board they elect.  That is clearly NOT the case anymore.  State-level organizations have organized to liberate superintendents from the control of their local school boards and to place them under the control of state interests.  (See https://www.opswindow.com/2023/05/25/the-man-behind-the-curtain/ and other articles at the same website for a better understanding of how this has occurred.)  To accomplish this required that school boards be domesticated to properly serve their superintendents.  If school board members begin interacting with the public, administrators risk losing their exclusive control over the school district.  This reprimand was intended to ensure that school board members won’t even listen to their constituents, let alone talk to them.

Please bear with me just a little further for another relevant comparison.  If a school board member’s talking to the public incurs risk of liability to the school district, then wouldn’t a district administrator’s talking to the public incur precisely the same risk of liability to the school district?  It absolutely would.  And yet administrators have no reservation about talking to the public because liability was never the concern.  The concern is CONTROL.  End of story.

When the superintendent, school attorney, and board president summoned Ms. Tonsing weeks ago to express their concerns about her inviting the public to speak to her, she assured them that she was just LISTENING to the public.  To settle their fears, she even recruited the assistance of an attorney to attend these public forums with her to ensure that she didn’t do or say anything that would incur legal liability upon the school district or herself.  That still wasn’t enough, because LIABILITY WAS NEVER THE CONCERN!

Liability concerns arise only when the benefit is low and the risk is high.  This is the exact opposite . . . in the extreme.  The benefit is high.  This is exactly what we WANT our elected officials to do.  And the risk was low, even lower once she enlisted the assistance of an attorney whose practice includes education law.

Appalling!

It is appalling that all of Ms. Tonsing’s fellow board members so compliantly pulled out their signature stamp when asked and stamped their endorsement on the dotted line exactly where and when the big man told them to.  To be clear, I don’t think these board members are bad people.  I believe that the organizational structure of our schools has been inverted to marginalize the role and power of the school board.  Our board members are now doing exactly what the organizational culture they have inherited has asked them to do.  It is time now for them to awaken and recognize their complicity in fostering the dysfunctional culture that enables our school district administrators to control their school boards this way.

2939140cookie-checkOzark School Board censures one of their own!yes