GUEST EDITORIAL
Following Matt Growcock’s appointment to the Ozark R-6 School Board, Christian County Trumpet Publisher Johnny Rooster confronted him on camera and asked, “Did Mark Jenkins ask you personally to be on the board, to apply?” Mr. Growcock responded “No.” (FYI, Mark Jenkins and Matt Growcock are close buddies.) It is hardly plausible that they didn’t discuss, frequently I would imagine, Mr. Jenkins’ experience on the board and Mr. Growcock’s interest in becoming a board member. But the wording of the question wasn’t “Have you and Mark ever talked about his experience being on the board or your interest in being on the board?”
The question was “Did Mark Jenkins ask you personally to be on the board?” And to that, Mr. Growcock can presumably answer honestly “No.” Even if Mr. Jenkins said “Hey, Matt, you’d make a great board member,” or “I would sure love to see you on the board,” or “Have you ever thought of joining the school board,” or “Would you consider RUNNING for school board,” Mr. Growcock could presumably still answer “No, Mark Jenkins did not ask me personally to be on the board.” And that could still be a technically true answer, even if it was close to false.
NOTE: Mr. Growcock is a lawyer, familiar with careful word choices.
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“To apply”
But when Mr. Rooster added “to apply” at the end of the question, the question became “Did Mark Jenkins ask you personally to apply to be on the board.” It seems far less likely his answer of “No” holds true with this revision. The question is equivalent to “Did Mark Jenkins ever suggest that applying for appointment to the board might be preferable to running for election to the board?”
It seems HIGHLY unlikely that “No” is an accurate answer.
It seems highly unlikely close friends would somehow overlook the opportunity to discuss the advantages of appointment over election in gaining membership to this elitist group, especially when one of them is already the president of this board. But, who knows, we should give him the benefit of the doubt . . . at least until further reason arises to question his veracity.
Mr. Rooster next asked, “When did you put your application in?”
Mr. Growcock started to respond with an annoyed, “You know, I’m not interested in . . .” He then thought better of it, perhaps due to the obvious presence of the camera. He redirected his response, answering, “I put my application in the first day.” He further clarified, “on a Monday.”
True, Mr. Growcock filed his intent to RUN for office on the first day of the election filing period. But it appears he filed his application for APPOINTMENT on the last day (or close to it) of the filing period.
Or rather, his application was not distributed to all the board members with the early applications. His was not distributed until the last day of the application process, suggesting he didn’t apply when he claimed he did.
Since the question was about the APPOINTMENT, not the CAMPAIGN FILING, it would seem his answer was a bit duplicitous.
Or perhaps he filed it and asked that it be held. Who knows?
There is always a possibility the available evidence doesn’t reflect the truth here. But at best, it still seems his answer about when he submitted his application was a bit evasive, perhaps even duplicitous. With that in mind, is there still grounds for giving him the benefit of the doubt as to whether his best buddy president of the board suggested he accept appointment instead of campaigning?
The proof of any scientific theory is found in its ability to correctly predict experimental outcomes (or not-yet-known phenomena in the real world). The proof of any theory, it would seem, lies in its ability to explain beforehand what outcome to expect. This is not to say that a theory is necessarily true just because it gets a single prediction (or even several) right. But it is still the predictive power of a theory that explains its value. Before the recent appointment of Guy Callaway’s replacement was made, the predictable outcome was that the board would appoint someone close to them as a replacement. There is fair reason for this. More jobs, I understand, are filled by referral/recommendation than by interview. The devil you know is preferable to the devil you don’t. Why risk getting another troublemaker on the board when we could get another good ol’ boy instead? The problem with this argument is that board is not a club. It is not even a business. It is a REPRESENTATIVE body. Its function is to represent the community. The board deliberately bypassed the legal channel one of their own members proposed to them for allowing this position to be filled by election instead of appointment. They didn’t want that. They wanted to appoint another good ol’ boy friend instead. So they ran a sham of an application process. They ran a sham of a selection process (lasting only 30 minutes!). The relative proof of this allegation is that their process produced exactly the outcome you would expect from a sham process.
When the board convened Monday night to determine the process whereby they would select a replacement for Guy Callaway (a replacement which could and SHOULD have been selected by the voters, even after Guy Callaway’s attempt to prevent this), Christina Tonsing proposed that they together openly develop a fair and objective process to evaluate each candidate, perhaps by ranking and scoring them on “a rubric like teachers use” for grading, before making their selection.
NOPE! Why waste time on that?! We already know who we want.
To be fair, the board wasn’t well-positioned to follow this suggestion because they didn’t have much information on any of the applicants. That is another glaring failure of this process. They declined to interview the applicants. They declined even to narrow down a list of finalists and interview them. Without an interview, how could any fine candidate who wasn’t already known by multiple board members stand a chance when they had already invited a close buddy of theirs to apply for the appointment?
Again, to be fair, interviews would only be warranted if the board intended to make an honest selection. Since it appears unlikely that the board ever intended an honest selection, even an interview wouldn’t have helped an outsider to overcome the close-friend-of-the-board-president advantage Mr. Growcock enjoyed.
Timeline excuse
The board will surely explain that their inability to interview was a function of the tight timeline they were working with. Those running for the April election for the two available seats then had until Tuesday, January 28 to withdraw from the race. Since two applicants for Guy Callaway’s position were also candidates in the April election, the board felt they needed to make their selection before that deadline. I hope you already see the problem here. The board clearly ALREADY intended to select one of the two applicants who were also candidates in the general election. Otherwise there would have been no reason to curtail the entire selection process. There would have been no reason not to narrow down the list of applicants to a few finalists, interview those finalists, then select from the further insight those interviews yielded. Again, the board might say that to have done this would be to unfairly disqualify those who had also declared their interest in running in the April election. Perhaps so. But with only four candidates for two open positions, their odds in April were already pretty good. And this gives rise to an even greater concern.
Where are the other nine?
What motivated each of the nine applicants who applied to serve in the vacated position? Some of them were motivated by concerns about the school district in general. Some of them were motivated by specific concerns about the way the board operates. Some of them perhaps just wanted to be one of the decision-makers in our community. Some of them were explicit that they would ONLY serve out the remainder of Mr. Callaway’s turn and not run for reelection.
Two of them, however, had effectively previously made a request to the community that the COMMUNITY select them to represent the community to the board. They then effectively said, “actually, no, if we can just get ourselves appointed to the board directly, then we don’t need the community’s support. We were never really that interested in representing the community anyway. We were only interested in being on the board.”
Congratulations to Matt Growcock for his back-door appointment, rather than voter election, to the elitist club of the Ozark School Board. Perhaps he represented himself accurately in that interview, despite (admittedly inconclusive) evidence to the contrary. Or perhaps this interview is further evidence that board members picked another candidate just like themselves.
Postscript
Postscript: In fairness to both Mark Jenkins and Matt Growcock, I recently encountered a report that Dustin Kirkman (another board member) recruited Matt Growcock to run. If so, that doesn’t exonerate either much against the charges levied or implied in this article. It simply further affirms that whole selection process was shortchanged in order to ensure that none of the other fine candidates for this opportunity beat out the board’s pre-determined favorite!
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