Boone County School Superintendent Search Kickoff February 6
This meeting was open to the public and included school board members and the newly contracted recruiting agency, McPherson & Jacobson LLC Executive Recruitment & Development.
The Education subgroup of the BCRP Local Issues Committee took a proactive position in the superintendent search by brainstorming the desired characteristics of a superintendent and provided those to every board member two days before this meeting. As well, BCRP sent a letter to Board Chairman Jesse Parks, copied to every board member, indicating our expectation that BCRP be considered a unique stakeholder group providing input during the public input period. The primary justification for stakeholder acknowledgement is that BCRP represents 63,000 taxpayers.
Generally this proactive approach was ignored.
In the meeting, public seating was placed 20 feet from a square table set up for board members in the Ralph Rush auditorium. In a room with thousands of dollars of audio-visual equipment, no audio amplification was provided for the public. The consultant from St Louis leading the superintendent characteristics collection had a family health emergency and the presentation was shown on a single laptop, with laptop-only sound, via Zoom.
Even though hearing was difficult, it was clear the BCRP characteristics input was generally unrelated to the five characteristics the board chose.
Subsequently, but not officially, we learned BCRP would be relegated to one person in the “leaders” stakeholder group. Others to be included were a Democrat, a Libertarian, county commissioner, judge executive, and business group, likely 8-10 total. Other unique stakeholder groups are to be parents, teachers, students, classified staff, and administration. Each group will likely be 8-10 persons questioned by consultants for about two hours per stakeholder group. When calculated against taxpayers being represented, BCRP is the least represented and school administrators are most represented, by a factor of several hundred.
Conservative Republicans, 60% of your local taxes go towards the public school system. You are a stakeholder. Be ready in the near future to overwhelm the public, online surveys and hold the school board accountable for who they are hiring to lead our school district.
Local taxation based on $260,000 home valuation
