By BILL CHAISSON
In March I wrote an editorial about the Newport School Board that suggested it operated with an Alice in Wonderland kind of logic; I felt like I had fallen down a rabbit hole. Now I am thinking it is more like Lewis Carroll’s “Alice Through the Looking Glass”; after you pass through the mirror everything is the opposite of what it is in the real world.
The amount of discord at the Newport School Board has not decreased and the tone of discourse has not improved in the last couple of months. A very long letter from Virginia Irwin, the vice chair of the school board, appeared in the April 18 issue of the Argus-Champion. She read the entire letter aloud at the beginning of the April 4 meeting. She took Bert Spaulding and Kurt Minich to task for their bad behavior. Spaulding went to the podium during the ensuing meeting and spoke for 37 minutes straight and ultimately spoke for an hour in the course of the meeting. Minich has written a letter (below) that criticizes Irwin for her expression of anger and invokes his “freedom of speech.”
At the April 24 school board meeting — with the help of personnel from the state association of school boards — the members proposed changes in the public comment policy (see Glynis Hart’s article in this issue).
If the proposed rules are passed, public comment will be limited to three minutes per speaker and will have to address topics that are actually on the agenda for that night’s meeting.
This measure reminds of the experimental “free” school that I went to in fourth grade. I was the 1960s and public schools were experimenting. At the beginning of the school year we were permitted to attend whichever classes we wanted. Of course, everyone went to gym or art and stayed there. Then they told us, OK you can’t stay in the same class for two periods in a row. Then most kids toggled back and forth between gym and art all day. Then they decided OK you have to go to science, English, and history once a day and then you are on your own. That worked. We still had more freedom than most fourth graders, but less than we started with. They restricted our freedom because we had abused it.
Minich’s letter indicates that he thinks he is owed an apology for being on the receiving end of Irwin’s “vitriol.” I would think that anyone who as attended a school board meeting or watched one on NCTV would be taken aback by that expectation. Until they remember this is a looking glass world.
Like Minich, Claremont Councilor Jon Stone used the freedom of speech defense after he harassed a constituent online. Stone and Minich don’t get it. No one is accusing them of doing something illegal. They are being told that they are crossing lines determined by civility, but this doesn’t seem to register with either one of them.
Both Spaulding and Minich have repeatedly stepped beyond the bounds of propriety in their accusatory monologues at the school board meetings.
Irwin had to write and rewrite her comments in order to drain some of the anger out of them. She is a woman with some sense of propriety. That said, although she keeps her cool while trying make sense of Spaulding’s aggression and rudeness, her drawn-out criticism of Minich goes over the top. Essentially she gives as good as she has gotten from Minich, and that doesn’t get anyone anywhere.
At the April 4 meeting Spaulding accused the board of submitting fraudulent budget documents to the state and of causing the district to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars because of the fraud.
George Caccavero, who is serving as an interim finance director, held that position for a dozen years at Mascoma Valley Regional School District. He told Spaulding why is he was quite wrong and in some detail. Board member Rhonda Callum-King did much the same thing on a related topic back in March.
Spaulding is aggressive, impolite, and accuses board members of incompetence and fraud on a regular basis, but he is often basing his attacks on information that he either misinterprets or simply does not have. It makes him come off as pointlessly mean.
Democracy requires civility. Simple adherence to the letter of the law is not enough. We have to show respect for one another and that isn’t happening at the Newport school board.
Bill Chaisson is the editor of the Eagle Times.
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