2.10.2022 - Special Meeting of the Fall River School Committee

special meeting of the pharma school committee for thursday february 10th um deb please call the roll mr again mr bailey here mr harp here ms laramie miss pereira here it's roger here eric here pursuant to the open meeting law any person may make an audio or video recording of this public meeting or may transmit the meeting through any medium attendees are therefore advised that such recordings or transmissions are

being made whether perceived or unperceived by those present and are deemed acknowledged and permissible uh this is a special meeting to review the roles and responsibilities of the four of the school committee uh we're so happy to have glenn kutcher down from the massachusetts association of school committees to give us a review of the bylaws um i do want to acknowledge the fact that i will be

attending another event and i will not be able to stay for the whole thing so i don't want anyone to think i'm walking out on glenn it's very important i have taken this class before and he does a great job so i'll turn it over to glenn thank you thank you mr mayor good to see you again good to be back in fall river i hope i don't slip and say it's new bedford because i couldn't

do that before you'd be in trouble i'm gonna so for the purpose of clarity i'm gonna speak with my mask down but one of the challenges with masks is so we do it this way this is a general presentation please stop me with any questions that you have but i do want to tell you that one of the things we do when we worry people on roles and responsibilities of the superintendents

and the school committees is to talk about the fact that we prioritize student achievement we hope you do too we try to use school committee meetings as a vehicle to build credibility the public that watches on tv gets a lot of information from you there are a lot of important discussions questions that are raised that don't get hurt if they're not participated at a school committee meeting so it's

important for gaining the public support try to talk about some of the things that get in the way and uh i want to make one thing very clear dissent and disagreement are part of what we do we disagree we argue i try to encourage you to do it civilly i'm going to talk a little bit about that but having a good discussion with different points of view is a very important thing at the school committee

meeting i'm going to skip the role of the chair just for a second but i do want to emphasize a couple of points and i will be getting to them your role as a board member is as a member of the board individual school committee members do not have individual authority with the exception of the chair who has the authority to run the meeting and with the exception of anybody who gets the authority from the body

so for example from time to time you might be named the agent of the school committee for signing a contract or you might be designated a special committee member or special research project or something that you'd be taking on from the committee but it's the committee as a body that gives directions to the superintendent and the committee is a body that makes its decisions we're going to emphasize

things like your fiduciary responsibilities to uh to budget prudently to act as a member of the body to appreciate the chain of command now i mentioned earlier that i was first elected 50 years ago 50 years ago every single personnel action had to be approved by the school committee all the appointments all of the transfers everything had to go through the school committee that changed in 1993

and personnel authority was given to the superintendent for schools in the same way that the mayor has the authority over the municipal departments and for example you don't you may see things happening at elected boards but the authority of the mayor and the authority of the superintendent are discreet and they are defined in law if you attempt to undermine that authority you could find yourself in trouble with

the ethics commission and we'll talk a little bit about what some of those concerns were so you want to be pretty careful and we'll talk about a lot of those things and the chain of command now has authority in law as i'll explain a little bit later then we want to talk a little bit about confidentiality and privacy do any of you work in an area where the people you serve have the expectation of privacy uh

what what i'm a caseworker at the welfare department okay case worker therapist i'm a mental health therapist mental health okay you understand attorney you understand patient to client privilege you understand client privilege the same privacy rights apply to students and parents and employees so there will be times when something will happen to an employee of the district and the superintendent may not be able

to discuss it with you for a number of reasons we've had some cases in other communities i think you probably read about them where a student might have been victimized by a member of the faculty and the superintendent explains we're dealing with this we can't talk about it that's because she can't talk about another person's child without the permission of the other person's child's parents and guardians

if it's a teacher who is alleged to have done something inappropriate that teacher has privacy rights under the collective bargaining agreement or if it's the case of a bad teacher who doesn't teach well that person has privacy rights under the evaluation system so there will be times when rumors will run amok and the superintendent will not be able to tell you uh precisely what what's happening

because of the privacy rights involved it's a hard thing to get used to but we've had some significant things coming up and of course sometimes our friends in the media don't understand what do you mean you can't tell me what are you covering up covering up anything except she doesn't want the district to get sued for violating people's privacy rights we've got some emerging issues as you might expect

dealing with cova dealing with masks it's now been tossed back to the local communities going to be challenging for all of us vaccinations critical race theory flags a lot of those issues are going to be coming up before the school committee i don't know whether you've had crowds coming to your school committee meetings on some of these issues i hope you don't but but you may see

some we've had some meetings disrupted around the country there have been meetings that have been disrupted it's been a concern uh student social and emotional well-being has been a big topic for school committee members equity diversity inclusion big topics big topics for some bad topics for others and some of these arguments are being played out if you haven't had the critical race theory discussion yet

i can only tell you that i'm from cambridge massachusetts i was present at the creation of political correctness back in 1970 when they first started cancelling people the people who developed critical race theory were able to make it successful as a topic because they invited everybody to the table they had everybody involved in the discussion they didn't shut anybody up but they did play by the rules of civil

discourse and when they did that people realized we've been doing this for decades so it's not something that people need to fear uh the same thing will be true with you know if you have a rational conversation about vaccination about flags even social emotional learning has come under fire from some don't be afraid to have a public forum be the place with the table and talk these things out so people can

hear over and over again what it is i talked about privacy and confidentiality we're going to talk a little bit about public records and public records complaints and when we talk about the department of education i will give the commissioner a lot of credit he's really trying to change the culture so you know it's like people that have been uh fighting with people for years we we really hope that we'll be able to

develop at least the state of dayton and not be complaining about the department all the time oops uh four major principles to keep in mind the chair is the servant of the assembly not the master so the responsibility of the chair is to make sure that the people in the room know what's happening and that the people outside of the room know what's happening so the chair is sort of the play-by-play announcer for uh

for the school committee meetings for those people who watch it on television and uh the majority of the school committee can overrule the chair with a majority vote if you propose an amendment and someone says the amendment's out of order and you think it's in order you can always ask the majority to uh to do that because the chair is the servant of the age of the of the body the agenda is the property

of the body so if you want something discussed at a school committee meeting the majority of the school committee can display you can discuss the ukraine if you want to it's it's your meeting it's a public meeting and in massachusetts freedom of speech is freedom of speech stronger protection than even the federal constitution the authority of the school committee lies with the body

not with an individual i mentioned that earlier and people in the school district have specific authority to do things like manage the budget implement policies deal with the day-to-day operations control most of the personnel decisions in fact almost all the personnel decisions this discrete uh through law and uh i raised this because the national school boards association has raised this as the number one issue

raised by superintendents around the country and that is that individuals who give assignments to staff uh unless they're authorized by the board uh are violating protocols and policy and even the law i i once served with an individual who spoke for 45 minutes to an empty room the same individual had a different idea at least once or twice a meeting in order to get the business done

this member would propose something and we'd refer to the superintendent for a report and finally the superintendent took me aside one night and said i have 70 items that you've referred to me who do you think writes these reports i don't have a big staff give us a break it's called vanity time when nobody wants to do it but somebody tells the superintendent to do it just be mindful somebody's going to be

distracted to do that work and individual members if they're to assign something to the superintendent need to have the board assign it not individuals that doesn't mean you can't call at any time speak with the superintendent who is your employee deal with issues one-on-one with the superintendent but otherwise your authority is just like the authority of that parents would have when they come in and

you do not give up your role as a parent or as a citizen so if your child has an issue in a school and you're in school that day to deal with your child make sure that the people that you're dealing with know that i'm here as the parent of these children or this child i never use the term do you know who i am trust me they know who you are

but it can be intimidating for some people and you know you don't want our friends at the ethics commission coming down on you before doing that now key to being effective knowing what you can do knowing what you may do knowing what you must do and then knowing what you should do by that i mean you know you must be prudent in developing the district's budget you must be diligent in

following the open meeting law and the ethics law you must follow rules of order whatever you happen to do those are those are sort of must you may or you can call your colleague an idiot at a school committee meeting you can free speech the timing was right it's not smart you you can write a letter to the fall river herald and say i'm the only member of the forward the school committee who

cares about children you can do that and you may do that because it's freedom of the press but it gets you in really big trouble you can go on to social media and although executive sessions are private and legally executive session you can put all kinds of stuff on social media some stuff that maybe may be inappropriate you're going to think about what you should do how you should

use your time as opposed to what you must do or what you may do that's key using the best judgment school committee members by the way who know the rules and who understand the importance of policy know you can get to anything through policy and i would suggest to you if you if you haven't done this i have these parliamentary procedure cheat cards that tell you about motions and how to proceed and if you'd like we

can come back and do some training and parliamentary procedure because he or she who knows the rules has a distinct advantage over the people that don't okay now what's a school committee there are two houses of government in fall river the city council and the school committee you're the legislative branch of government to fall river for schools now the executive branch is sitting right here

but there are also checks and balances so in most of our cities the chief executive officer of the city sits on the school committee now that doesn't happen in towns and when i talk to my colleagues in other parts of the country really the mayor's on the school board how does that work and i'm just telling you i'm not saying this because the mayor's here i served with the mayor and the

school board it's a very important and advantageous thing to have because that means the executive side of the city has to be exposed to all the issues that exist on the legislative side with the school board so we found most of our mayors very supportive of schools and school budgets and a lot of it has to do with being at the school committee meeting but you're the legislature for schools so what do legislatures do

well they do a couple of things they set their own rules and procedures i'm assuming you have rules or procedures parliamentary procedures use robert's rules okay it's a good idea to get a cheat sheet and if you want a a booklet that describes robert's rules in brief just send me an email and we'll send them down to you've got all kinds of resources for that you also you know if the state legislature sets the law

well you make the rules in fall river the law for schools as it is except in your case the rules are policy school district policies now i know you've got a policy manual i know there are all kinds of policies in it there are hundreds and hundreds of different policies that school districts might have if we were in berkshire county right now we might have a question about farm animals and classrooms

because they have four age clubs uh you might have policies about attendance grading uh masking policies which you'll be looking at uh temporary policies that you adopted during covet all kinds of different policies that you might have uh we have access to the national policy database i can find anything for you if you're thinking about a policy that you might need you might want to check

in with us because we can advise you on who's already done it most school committees ask the superintendent to develop a policy proposal for them and to develop a budget for them to debate that's that's how it starts but just like all money bills originate in the house of representatives in fall river the school budget originates with the school committee and the superintendent

unlike most legislatures in this country you hire the chief executive so the chief executive for the city is on the school committee the chief executive for schools is here in the board room with you hired by you evaluated by you contracted with by the school committee and you can't delegate that you can you can have a search committee that's not all school committee members but the hiring

and evaluation of the superintendent is the school committee's responsibility you set the budget the budget is a very complex document there will get to that there are thousands of lines of data in a school budget and school committees will determine their proposed budget based on recommendations from the superintendent that budget will go to the mayor and the city council it will come back to you in final form

and you tell the superintendent how you want to manage that budget so for example in on my school committee we had making this up but we had 50 million dollars and we put that 50 million in nine different places administrators educators support staff supplies and equipment fuel travel out of state travel consultants whatever it might be and basically said the money's in nine different accounts if you need to move it

come back to us and we'll approve moving the money around in in the big picture some of the minutiae of a budget is generally left to the superintendent in terms of the number of people wherever the people are assigned and things like that um there's you know there is you joke about this in boston the f word the f word is february the a word is august but there's the m word and i don't use

it but i'm going to tell you what it is it's micromanagement i don't use the word micromanagement because sometimes it's a bullying term you're micromanaging don't whatever but there are school committee members who get in the way of day-to-day operations and there are superintendents who don't tell the school committees everything too so there's a balance that needs to happen another word i don't use you said

you are a counselor and you work with i work at the dta healthcare department essentially okay i used to run a children's mental health center i know what dysfunction is disagreement is not dysfunction so if somebody says oh the school committee's dysfunctional we don't allow that word to be used because i think it's a it's a term that gets abused and gives our members a bad name so

the other word that just so that you know that we don't use you know when i come down here for a long ride i usually bring stop at starbucks and get a hershey bar and mix it together and keeps you awake starbucks is a really robust coffee food is robust an evaluation system a curriculum system is not robust when you hear the word robust thrown around an academic setting be assured

that a storm is about to start we do not use the word robust at any time anytime my staff hears the word robust they turn and look at me and they hear it you know we just don't deal with it so think about that also are there any attorneys in the room no okay i need to alert you to something by virtue of being elected to the school committee you have become legally a public figure

let me explain what that means do you watch saturday night live do you see what they say about various political leaders personal leaders and others how merciless they are about it you wonder why they never get sued they don't get sued because they talked about public figures and under the supreme judicial court's rulings in massachusetts elected officials and the superintendent are public figures

so if i want to write a letter to the fall river herald and say terry smith the member of the fall river school committee is the stupidest human being i've ever seen is so stupid that terry can't add up a column of numbers is so stupid i don't know how terry finds their way home at the end of the day and by the way is a big fat pig i can say that because they're public figures

so if you've never been criticized in public before get used to it because you could be criticized in public and if the press wants to print something about you and you feel it's misleading whatever it is um you know you can write a letter to the editor and challenge them if you want to make a two-day story out of a one-day bad just think about it in massachusetts freedom of the press

is one of the basic freedoms and you know in the first amendment is freedom of the press freedom of speech freedom of religion freedom to assemble and you know what the last one is the right to petition your government for redress of grievances who's the government for schools in fall river you are so any of your constituents who wish to call you you're probably finding this out now if you're new

anyone who wishes to call you and discharge the contents of their mind and complain to you has every right to do it so listen respectfully if a constituent calls you refer the complaint to the superintendent if somebody comes to you and says my kid is a fourth grader in the smith school uh you don't have a smith school good in the smith school uh the teacher is terrible what are you going to do

in the old days we might have gone in as a school committee member and had a talk with the principal now that would be a violation of the chain of command you have to report the report the complaint to the superintendent who may not be able to tell you what she's doing about that complaint the complaining parent can call you anytime they like you can talk to them you know frankly if you want to

you can talk to anybody you like you can call up a principal in the school district and have a conversation it's just calling faculty members is an invitation for trouble speaking to administrators outside of an official function is an invitation for trouble so we urge you to be very it's one of those things that you may do because there's free speech but what you should do is exercise great caution you lose

control of what comes out of your mouth the minute it leaves your mouth and as i said get used to being criticized in public because in massachusetts it's a sport and there's the balance of power so balance of power the mayor is on the school committee the city council approves your budget the school committee majority can overrule the chair if it wishes balancing of power in municipal government

is inherent in keeping things together and as i said um knowing what you should do doing your homework knowing the issues makes you very very effective and very credible uh your other duties oh that's the the state constitution by the way says not only can the constituents call you they can give you instructions about how to do your job you don't have to do what they tell you and you know every conversation is going

to open up with the biggest lie that you're told which is i voted for you how many people you know i got 600 votes but 10 000 people told me they voted for me so listening to your constituents is very important one of the one of the most important elements of an elected board is that the public has the sense that it is being heard because you can speak to them and they

can watch what you do uh you have some hiring responsibilities that i'm going to talk to you about goal setting and strategic planning goes through the school committee your district policies from the school committee school improvement plans are reviewed by the school committee the superintendent will be sharing those with you and uh one other quick question have any of you ever engaged in collective

bargaining or union negotiations uh obviously obviously you have uh are you have you i'm part of my union with the dta i'm a worker for that okay okay so collective bargaining collective bargaining is done under the authority of the school committee now depending upon where you are uh in some of our bigger cities the attorney for the district will be heavily involved in collective

bargaining the superintendent or your chief business officer or personnel officer will do that they'll get follow the goals of the school committee they'll get directions from you and they'll pursue those goals in collective bargaining sometimes the school committee members sit at the table okay now if you're in western massachusetts we could we've got districts with 120 people in them and one district with one kid

uh small districts where three members of the school committee sit around the cafeteria table with the union and try to hammer out a contract and and then in cities it's a big it's a big production so it depends on where you are we'll talk a little bit about that role personnel functions you hire contract with the superintendent and you evaluate the superintendent you hire your legal counsel

uh now i i always advise people don't look for trouble where no trouble exists so when i say if you don't like your legal counsel you can get another one you can do that i'm not suggesting that you do that but i'm just saying legal counsel works for the school committee now your legal counsel is through okay so he knows what he's doing uh important thing to know about your legal counsel if you think

that you may be uh about to do something that might get you in trouble with all good intents if you think that you may have a legal conflict of interest if you think that you might risk violating the open meeting law and you contact your legal counsel for guidance that advice is protected by attorney-client privilege so whatever your protocol is for reaching out to your legal counsel he can advise you in confidence

about issues that involve you and the school district he can't help you buy a house but he can he can he can advise you and that's protected conversation the school committee confirms the appointments of assistant superintendents deputy superintendents whatever the superintendent title may be you approve the appointment of the school business manager or whoever the chief financial officer is and that's

because you have a fiduciary responsibility and the people who manage the money are among others the business manager the special education director is also approved by the school committee and school physicians nurses and attendance officers as well come under the authority of the school committee for confirmation and you set the district personnel policy under which they work such as collective bargaining or

policies that relate to non-union personnel your approval of these people who would be recommended to you cannot be unreasonably so if the superintendent recommends and again just making this up as a hypothetical recommend somebody to be the special education director and you say uh this person's never had experience as a sped director but there were four candidates who were very experienced in sped directing

i'm not confident in this candidate that that would be reasonable but if somebody's called you and says i want you to defeat this candidate so that i'll be next in line that would be unreasonable we actually had someone once who said in public why are you recommending her to be this fed director don't we already have enough women in the central office now okay quiz time what's wrong with that

there's more wrong with it than you think i know the behavioralists refer to this as wait time you know it's it's illegal it's discrimination on the basis of sex it's stupid but that's not necessarily problematic the key is that it's a civil rights violation and if you violate somebody's civil rights you will be personally liable otherwise if somebody sues the district they'll sue the district they won't sue you

personally so that's where as i said if you think there's a problem you call your legal counsel and it's uh it's a conversation protected by attorney planning privilege now the superintendent has clear legal and discrete authority over the day-to-day operations of the school district if there's a ticket on my car superintendent manages the school's day to day has authority over all personnel

now teachers in the school buildings report to the principal who reports to the superintendent so in one way or another the superintendent has authority over the personnel in the district uh can i ask you a question yes please did you just say that all principles work directly for the superintendent well the principals might report to an assistant superintendent who might then report to the superintendent but

any just any action taken by a subordinate to the superintendent is subject to the review of the superintendent so in essence the same okay superintendent implements your policies and implements your budget and she manages the budget approved by the school committee now the authority of the school committee on budgeting is fairly general so i say the superintendent will present to you a recommendation

you may approve not only the dollars but there might be language that goes uh with that for example uh uh weymouth a couple of years ago put sixty thousand dollars in the athletic budget for the express purpose of promoting opportunities for females in middle school and blow their goal was to create physically fit kids start in the lower grades teach them competitive sports and build a good program feed a system

into the high school but it was a deliberate and that's where the superintendent spent the money so in a general way language goes into the budget and numbers go into the budget and the superintendent has authority within the budget that you have set to make the day-to-day decisions necessary to to run the school district so that's the authority of the superintendent as they say it's very

broad we have been very lucky that there have been very few cases that have ever gone outside a school district over the authority of the superintendent and the school committee we sort of don't want judges helping to interpret the roles and responsibilities because the law and i believe you have all been provided with one of these this is general laws for education the law says you make policy

and the superintendent has general oversight of the district everything else we've filled in over the years so sometimes there are situations when the role of the superintendent and the role of the school committee become vague and that's where we get a lot of questions about whose authority is in play it can be as simple as uh who gives out the diplomas at graduation we've had that battle in some districts uh

who has authority over masking versus not masking how about the fine tuning of the mask in question i would just throw out to you and and you know you know the lines get blurry or the blue of the school committee and the green of the superintendent become yellow because you can't figure out which one it is are there any examples that any of you have experienced that reflect disagreements over roles and

responsibilities because they they they come up all the time i have one go ahead can you can you be nice and loud because these masks make it sure no problem so i had a question on the budget uh the responsibility of the school committee related to the budget and the line items this has been an issue for 15 years in this district school committees have the right because we i've been on them where we actually

set parameters how many ftes we can determine how how tight it wants to be or is it open so we've had situations where superintendents in the past have told us no that's not your role and the school committee can go back and forth and then the majority members of the school committee say no we don't care we don't want to do any line items we'll just let them do whatever they want because it's

told by the superintendent that we don't have that response we don't have that right to make that decision so that's one that's a very clear one and it i feel strongly that we should there there's an interesting right of the superintendent uh you may fund certain things uh she may elect not to spend the money so there are cases where school committees have created let's say that the weymouth case

where they might have created uh additional coaching responsibilities the middle school the superintendent could have said uh i know that's where you want to spend the money but i don't feel we need to spend it and then it becomes an issue for the school committee and the superintendent to work out sometimes we see situations where superintendent wants to reorganize with regard to personnel

and the law gives the superintendent the authority to reorganize but for example if the school committee said we want to have three math coaches in the middle school and the superintendent felt that that wasn't the best strategy only if the school committee absolutely directed her to do that would she have to do it and then she would not necessarily have to fill the positions now when you have superintendents who

tell the school committee know what you put there and we can't do it then the school committee and the superintendent can have that conversation but the the fine detail of budgeting is something that most school committees don't do because they they just don't have that kind of knowledge however as i say there are some things that you may do some things that you should do you're going to be very careful about

specifying the the micro detail of where the personnel go because that the overall management authority of the superintendent can be compromised by anything the school committee might do in the detail of its budget the same way in collective bargaining when you're negotiating a contract you can't negotiate provisions into the contract or put provisions into the budget that impair the superintendent's ability

to put whoever the superintendent feels is the most appropriate person at the appropriate time in the position i'm trying to be really careful about pronouns here because i'm from cambridge and we're very politically correct my pronoun is it according to my grandchildren but can i call up on that so yeah just to clarify what i was what i was meaning so we currently have we had a lot of policies that were very clear

school committee said we're going to hire uh we we have 800 employees in the district in our budget we divide those up the budget time x amount per place so we would set the number they got rid of those policies in the prior school committee and the law school committee didn't want to take that responsibility back to say no we can't just just because we have the money doesn't mean you should hire extra

people that's binding us to further you know so if you had a bunch of people at top step making 90 000 10 people and five of those people retired and you were going to pay them 45.

we in my opinion have a fiduciary responsibility to say we can only still hire 10 people what what the last superintendent wanted to do was say no we can hire because we got the money we can hire nine people so now we have 14 and without the authority of the school committee that's where i was coming in that we can actually say correct with like we can set the number

of ftes in the budget uh by policy that's a risky that's a risky tactic because that can get in the way of the superintendent's ability to manage the money so what i would suggest to you is if the school committee itself as a body creates a very specific definition that you could probably sustain but once the year starts i mean there are there are districts and i think plymouth is one of them

they have a hundred line items in their budget i could be wrong because it was at one time ten buildings ten lines for each building and if the superintendent needed to move money from building a to building d the school committee would step in and approve that i don't know whether they still do it but that particular detail would sort of control what you're asking about uh in terms of moving stuff from one to

another but over the course of the year there are too many variables that can hit you and you don't know what you're going to do if for example we had you know the month of february and the first part of march was freezing cold beyond any expectations and your fuel bill ran dry you'd have to get it from some place if you know one of our schools cyclone blew the roof off of the high

school you need to replace the roof you've got to find the money someplace you've got to have the flexibility to do it to do it that's the opposite yeah what i'm talking about is spending more money than what they have so i just think it needs to be clear because at some point this committee is going to have to vote on whether we want to do a budget that just says here you

can do whatever you want hire who you want or we're going to take time to go through and say we should have well each school should have a certain amount but what i don't want to leave here with because it's a training by you is to have the chairman of the committee like he did last time be able to try to tell the committee members we don't have a

right to do this we just let them do what they want we have a right whether it's a smart thing to do or not is up to each member but i don't want to leave it wishy-washy but but it's not the best judgment to do it i'll make that editorial comment yeah it's not the best way to do business and it's risky to do that but yes legally legally

with a literal letter of the law in your fiduciary responsibility you can micromanage that budget as tightly as you want almost nobody does it anymore it's all done in big blocks but you could be in the middle somewhere that's what i thank you some examples contact with faculty uh free speech is your right but it's a dangerous tactic to uh to deploy if you're you know what don't ever

if someone calls you and says i have to go in for my kid's iep meeting i'd love you to accompany me to the iep meeting that's very dangerous for a couple of reasons one of them is it's using your position beyond the scope of authority and that will get you in trouble and the operative case where this occurred was when a member of a school committee said to a superintendent

i want you and i to work out my child's placement and let's not go through the the iep process and that cost each of them four thousand dollars a piece in fines from the ethics commission so for for uh and running the chain of command that's a very tricky situation for me that it's a very tricky situation for me in my role okay because that's part of what i do

as a point that's actually a big chunk of right and if your work requires you to do that then you just file a disclosure and says i'm here in my capacity as the child's case officer to look out for the interests of the child but you may want to uh you can call the ethics commission if you have a question a live person answers the phone of course you call your legal counsel first

because that's confidential if you call the ethics commission they'll respond to you and they'll advise you they won't advise you about anybody else but they will advise you about you and there are situations where representing someone before the city might not be permitted so you just want to be careful and check it out first there are a lot of people like you who work in social service agencies in the community and

they figure out how to do it and just disclose uh go ahead let me just make one please please uh we've run into that situation several times over the years and my advice has always been to contact this commission one thing about the ethics commission they will not talk to anyone but the person herself or himself as a matter of fact before they even talk to your counsel they have to get your authority to do something

so that the best and the most efficient way of doing is is what glenn mentioned is pick up the phone and call them because they're always there and they're always going to they're always going to answer your your call and they'll initially at least most times will give you a verbal and then they can follow it up with something and writing for you that's the best way to do it but if you call him first

and he tells you how you shouldn't be doing that then your best advice is to stop doing it rather than alerting the the uh the regulatory side you know just stop doing what's wrong uh because you might then continue to do something that's wrong and and uh and create a problem and the your legal counsel can advise you on how to pose the questions we're not hiding anything from the

ethics commission but a lot of people do things in very good faith that they don't realize you know brings about some conflicts and the ethic ethics commission is frequently finding new uh new different types of violations and they uh they let us know about them uh intervening on hiring and assignments this used to go on all the time it's now very much illegal calling the superintendent to say i got

somebody who needs a job and what this person put to work that happened everywhere prior to 1993 it happens less now it's not supposed to happen at all advocating for students is a big role for school committee members just make sure that when you advocate for students you're advocating for all students and if you decide to go in and advocate for your own children exclusively do it

as a parent not as a school committee member but don't stop advocating for kids in general there's an issue around exempting individuals from policies if there are going to be exemptions you know put it in your policy and give it to the superintendent don't do it at a school committee meeting and let me tell you what i mean if i have a child who's going to enter the fall river public schools how old

does that child have to be six whole five five by one by september first september 1st or august 3rd start august 33rd because in a district that's big i guarantee you you've probably got five kids who were born september 1st and then there's five kids behind them born september 7.

and we had a kid when i was on the school committee mother shows up where the dreams of you know the psychiatrist who's who's asses my kid says the next einstein this kid reads books this kid speaks several languages but his birthday is one day too late are you really going to be that fussy and not let them start kindergarten this kid is going to be in the third grade by next year

we couldn't make an exception because their four kids waiting outside to come in next so just be really careful on exceptions to your policy and if you're going to have them give the superintendent the authority to grant them special education i talked about in terms of your role union negotiations it's a very formal dance on union negotiations collective bargaining is a whole other set of things to learn

it's collective bargaining is i liken it to sort of criminal prosecution there are formal roles for each side of the courtroom you are management's side of the table you are never labor side of the table in your role as a school committee member as sympathetic as you may feel to the unions you're the management side and collective bargaining is done under the formal rules of collective

bargaining which i think are more complicated than the irs code that's why you never want to go to the bargaining table without expert guidance at your side okay so we talked about some of the things that you shouldn't do even though they're not necessarily illegal dangerous conversations repeating i'm sure some of you have had this experience where the constituents call you and they don't like the answer

and they ask you again and they don't like it repeated so they ask a third time see this happens to us all the time that's why we have the three question rule in masc we'll answer the same question once and then we'll answer it twice if you ask the same question again we give you a warning and if you ask it the fourth time we terminate the call because you've got people that don't

take no for an answer and that's part of your life got to be polite listen respectfully for as long as you can uh your conversations are highly likely to be misinterpreted especially if someone wants to hear something that you didn't say but really wants to hear it so i've referenced all of these different functions and given them to you in writing so that you can study them think about them

and if you have any questions you can call us the temptation to yield to the moment have you had big big meetings where all kinds of people have turned up occasionally occasionally i'm talking like 100 people 200 people and they were all very upset no you have no okay everyone decides to show up at the school committee and okay good for you because the rule of thirds applies at those meetings

a third of the people come for attention a third of the people come for therapy this can be very cathartic and a third of the people come to try to help you out but the other interesting thing is that nobody listens to anybody else i mean how much of it can you take so be as polite as you can let people be heard after they've been heard you can move on with special education

roles of the school committee are to know that your district policies are in place you don't need to be special educators you don't need to know how it works uh you don't need to know anything about behavioral health you just need to know that your policies see if i can do that whoops your policies need to make sure that parents and students have the opportunity to plan the services for their child

that services are free and appropriate that students have the right to participate in the planning for their child and you have the right to all the information and documentation that you may need now i guarantee that your district policies are in place and the reason i guarantee that is because when the state comes in looking if they don't find them you will know so don't look for trouble where no trouble exists

just remember that your parents are often single-issue constituents they care about their own children they care about everybody but they really care about their own children and parents can be very passionate when their children have special needs so you need to be really understanding of people who bring these concerns to your attention just don't try to fix them for them other than referring them to

the appropriate the appropriate people talked about this talked about your policy real quick on collective bargaining uh who's at the table myself the superintendent hr director and the cfo okay as well as other staff interviews okay is there ever a situation where it gets to the point where the school committee is involved uh over the last 20 some odd years we've had a couple of occasions where the

committee gets involved but not literally okay so the school committee sets its goals and policies you put them into your budget you give them to the people who do your collective bargaining and hopefully things work smoothly cities and towns have consistent histories of labor relations some are smooth and peaceable and everything moves along quickly others are always contentious if you have labor peace

don't look for trouble if you don't have labor peace uh i would just ask you to keep in mind that uh there are some things about collective bargaining that you want to make sure that you just pay attention to and one of them is the bargaining is done in bargaining session it's not done in public and it's done in bargaining sessions for a reason and one of those reasons is that state and federal law requiring

you don't want to turn bargaining into into a circus you have to prepare you need to be as reasonable as you can be you're never working without a contract because when your contract expires if you haven't negotiated a new one the old one stays in effect until the new one is negotiated now this is sort of a personal anecdote but one of my children is a teacher in a school district that will not be

named because i don't want the brookline people to get angry with her and she comes in one saturday and she confronts me and she says you know what um we're working without a contract and i said and i bet morale has never been his law she's right and i said and i bet you don't feel respected as teachers that's right and i bet this is not acceptable to you that's right how did you know listen becky

i got the playbook those talking points right out of the playbook oh and the union's not the school committee's not bargaining in good faith right right okay be prepared to think stall they will argue that you know you're not bargaining good faith morale is never talking points that are consistent it's designed to be part of the collective bargaining process ultimately everybody comes together ultimately

you will get a new contract arrangement just a couple of other things that i didn't want to point out to you if the if the school committee has a pit bull as an attorney the union has to accept the pit bull if the union has a pit bull as its rep from from the parent union you have to accept who they send as their representative you get to pick your legal counsel they get to pick theirs

it's like a criminal case the d.a doesn't get to pick the defense attorney and the defense doesn't get to pick the d.a and bargaining is done at the bargaining table so if things stall and somebody says to you you can't trust him he'll she won't tell you the truth meet me at dunkin donuts and we'll settle this that's an unfair labor practice bargaining is done at the bargaining table by the bargaining team don't

bargain outside the the realm of the team and whatever you do don't threaten anybody i will tell you i was witness on my days as a school committee to a school committee member who told a member of the bargaining team i know you want to be an assistant principal it's never going to happen i will see to it that you are stuck in that classroom for the rest of your life well that's a real threat

and you know as opposed to a rhetorical threat which is i'm ready to kill you oh i'm not going to kill you you know that so there is that as an issue uh so a couple of things about the open reading law sort of the reader's digest version things that you need to make sure you know uh your secretary and the superintendent will make sure that your meetings are posted 48 hours ahead of time

exclusive of saturdays sundays and holidays so everyone will know when you're going to meet the public has the right to know that the secretary will take your minutes the minutes will be approved by the school committee eventually and they will be public and the public has the right to attend your meetings except for the executive sessions the agenda has to include what the chair reasonably anticipates

will be discussed at the meeting now yesterday for example the evening after the governor made his announcement on masks school committees suddenly found oh here's an issue that the chair couldn't anticipate it wasn't on our agenda but you could talk about it because the chair couldn't anticipate it coming up so the public so it has the right to know what you're going to be talking about except

in really urgent situations deliberation takes place in the committee meeting room deliberation means in this case discussions about anything relevant to the school committee or its work and it means that a majority of you can only discuss school related issues at a school committee meeting now i'm going to make something up and let's say someone is proposing that elementary foreign language instruction be taught

in fall river i don't know why that's happening it's a reminder of something but i think it's reminding me about fall river because i thought this meeting was at 6 30.

yesterday sorry about that oh elementary foreign language do you offer it here k to six of them let's say you wanted to offer elementary foreign language well whose decision is it about whether to add a new program to the fall river public schools it's policy it's a new program it requires an appropriation is it administration or policy i would say to create a new program it's policy

what about the selection of the language that you're going to teach anybody want to weigh in i want to guess well don't guess there's no right answer because superintendents have argued that's administrative and school committee members have argued that's policy in one of our communities and i'm going to say it was new bedford and let's say it was a while back someone was suggesting french

someone was suggesting spanish because it's the second most frequently spoken language in the commonwealth and and then someone suggested yeah but in new bedford portuguese is the second most frequently spoken language and that's the culture that we want to preserve and because the policy question because the question involved the entire community and had implications for the entire community the school committee

determined it was a policy question now you could argue that either way my goal is to keep those questions out of the courtroom and whenever we've asked our attorneys about you know what's the rule for defining policy versus administration in those cases the same answer we always get is you have to work it out so you know we know that there's a problem in a district when every week

we're getting one or two calls from the same district saying who's in charge of this who's in charge of that and it's never good so working it out is important now you may under certain circumstances convene in executive session which is legally private and it's allowed for very specific purposes to go into executive session first of all you have to convene in public the chair has to explain why you're

convening an executive session protecting any individuals who need to be protected then you take a roll call to go into executive session and the chair indicates whether or not you'll be coming back out so if you uh because you don't want everybody to go home and then you come out of session and that's when you change the bus stops and when you can go into executive session for certain reasons i've given you a

full page on this one because the type is too small in order to discuss somebody's character and reputation or physical and mental health or to discuss discipline or dismissal or complaints about a municipal official now in those cases the people you're talking about need 48 hours notice they're entitled to be represented they're entitled to speak on their own behalf and they're entitled to record

the meeting just an interesting bit of trivia this 48 hours includes saturday sundays and holidays as opposed to calling the meeting which excludes saturday sundays and holidays you can go into executive session to talk about collective bargaining strategy or to negotiate litigation or to talk about bargaining parameters for people who don't have collective bargaining rights such as the superintendent or

most of the people under contract if you're going to deploy security devices you don't want the bad guys to know where they are so that can be an executive session to investigate charges of criminal misconduct because you don't necessarily want the bad guys to know that you're on to them purchasing leasing or exchanging real property you don't want to give your bargaining position away

to comply with any other general or special laws that require you to be an executive session anything related to privacy legitimate privacy collective bargaining the law labor law requires it meeting with a mediator superintendent search committees can meet an executive session and patents and trademarks very rarely do we ever have any involvement with patents and trademarks although i'm told sometimes

the red sauce in the high school cafeteria is so good they don't want anybody to take it apart um i know that if you're if you are new school committee members you've been through the ethics commission briefing so you've seen all that i'm going to just show you one thing that you want to keep be mindful of oh you take a bribe you go to jail end of discussion we've had some classics it's a sensitive subject

the bride has a legal cousin which is a gratuity a gift that'll be 50 or less no strings attached no queer pro quo we do a separate workshop exclusively on the open meeting law and would be happy to do that and of course if your immediate family member or business partner is involved in something before the school committee or someone with whom you're negotiating employment you should

not participate you should excuse yourself you should leave the room but let me just show you who your immediate family is this is the last thing i'm going to show you the immediate family is you and your spouse or partner their immediate family and for both of you your parents your children and your siblings now think about this my wife's brother was a conflict of interest my sister's husband is not

because my sister's husband is not my or my sister's parent children or siblings so the brother-in-law sister-in-law could be a conflict of interest you want to be careful you know who's not up there cousins uncles aunts grandparents grandchildren they're to who they are so i'm going to stick around if anybody has any specific questions around rules and responsibilities to answer your questions but i'm giving you

the yes please will you have um or send us emails uh regarding any kind of um uh other maybe workshops that you might be having in the future yeah you can take part of that virtually or yeah virtually it will come down we do we do very elaborate stuff on budgeting on chapter 70 funding open meeting law various elements of team building sometimes state and federal legislation whatever whatever people need

that'd be good okay um some of you are going to complete some more have who's new okay i will take see me before you leave uh you have the stick drives i gave the new people those are deep resources extensive resources on everything we've talked about it's a four gigabyte stick drive we only use half a gig so you've got three and a half complementary gigs on the stick drive you can save whatever you want

whatever you feel like if i could just take a minute um maureen lacroix here she is my my coach from uh the new superintendent's induction program which i'm part of first year superintendents are assigned to coach and she's been uh for the cfi coaches and my mentor former principal and uh superintendent in bedford in bedford and bedford yes time for you to go no that wasn't a lot that was the last

so i'll stay and answer questions informally for you the four of you who are new i just want to see you for a second before you go and i'll give you some uh further documentation uh anybody not get this book you get this book right yeah yeah everybody got it okay you know what this is worth on the street it's less than fifty dollars in value so you can take it

do you have to end the meeting oh we do parliamentary perspective i just wanna

ned and all um you for putting the time in for this tonight i work with superintendents in a number of districts in the state and understanding so i'll take it from a superintendent perspective because it's my strongest point of view perspective the working relationship between individuals of the school community is just critical to the success of the system so really commend you for doing this and thank

well thank you very much for being here appreciate it thank glenn thank you very much thank you good to see you again more than likely have questions for you afterwards as well nobody's very uh motion to adjourn

yes