New Wake school board majority debuts, and it’s a fiasco
As the first meeting of the “new” Wake County Board of Education ended last night, more than five hours after it began, I listened in as former board member Carol Parker and former candidate Curt Stangler were discussing what they’d just seen. Parker said she was furious about the majority’s preemptory tactics. Stangler, not disagreeing, predicted better times ahead — because how could things get worse?
I should immediately add that Parker’s not the furious type, and Stangler even less so, if that’s possible. You’re looking for solid moderates? Reasonable people who’ll listen to every side? They are all of that. Parker was part of the old pro-diversity majority when she was on the board, Stangler a mild critic when he ran in ‘05. (He lost to Eleanor Goettee in District 9, the Cary district.) But there’s not a strident bone in either one of them. And last night, sitting together, they probably constituted the only unaligned pair of observers in a meeting room filled with angry teachers, angry parents, angry (or appalled) Wake school system officials, a few folks who were on the side of the new board majority, and of course the objective press corps, myself included.
My point is, if even Carol Parker and Curt Stangler thought the new board majority had just screwed up (and they’re much too polite to use such a word, but on the way out of the meeting Parker repeated to Debra Goldman, who’s part of the majority bloc, how furious she was about their tactics), it’s a pretty good indication that the majority’s debut as public officials in charge was an unmitigated failure.
Let’s review: There were two ways the new five-member majority could’ve handled their first meeting. One was, they could’ve reached out to those on the other side — including the other four members of the board — and initiated the kind of gradual, thoughtful and community-wide change process that the issues facing the school system clearly merit … and that some of the five, at least, have been promising since they were elected. They won; they have an agenda; no need to rub everybody’s noses in it.
The other way: They could charge in, ignore everybody who’s missed out on the Kool-Aid, do the same thing they accused the old board of, which is not listening to people with different ideas, and attempt to get their way real fast before any opposition can get organized to stop them.
The five — Goldman, Debra Goldman, Deborah Prickett, Chris Malone, John Tedesco, and the new chair, Ron Margiotta — chose the second way.
If there’d been any fur in the room, it would’ve flown a few minutes after the meeting started.
But then a funny, if predictable thing happened. The five of them blinked.
Having pissed off just about everybody there with an amazingly brazen or else tone-deaf brand of political pushiness, the five seemed all of a sudden to get cold feet, and they backed away from most of their own agenda.
Thus, they ended up with the worst of both worlds: They came off looking like power-hungry pols who didn’t give a damn about consensus; but unlike your effective PHP’s, they’d failed to finish the job and in fact let themselves be talked out of most of what they proposed rather easily — which made them look inept.
That’s not to say they won’t follow through on all of it eventually. It’s only to observe that, after coming to their first meeting loaded for bear — with a list of eight giganto policy resolutions they literally pulled out of their pockets and threw on the table — the new majority hemmed and hawed and struggled to defend their positions to the point that you wondered about their ability to, you know, plan ahead?
I mean, if you’re going to act like a bully, you shouldn’t cave in at the first sign of resistance.
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As we were walking out of the meeting, Goldman said her intention was to present the various resolutions for debate — “get the issues on the table” — and not to ram them through. She anticipated lots of discussion and give-and-take, she said. She seemed sincere (and a little shell-shocked).
But if that’s what she intended, it sure didn’t come off that way. Which Parker told her straight up. Goldman said she was chagrined that most of the teachers, who’d hooted loudly at the new board’s openers and used the public comment period to chew them out, walked out a little later — after Margiotta threatened to have them removed unless they quieted down.
Parker told her they had a right to walk out, and she predicted that the way the majority conducted itself would only serve to awaken a sleeping giant — the vast number of teachers, parents and other supporters of the Wake school system who didn’t vote in October, probably because they thought both sides in the campaign had a point, but who aren’t going to like it if the new board tramples everything that’s positive about the Wake system.
Stangler thought that Goldman should be credited for sounding a conciliatory note, and pulling her allies back from the brink, after the others had dug themselves a deep hole with their blustery beginning.
Fair enough. I also thought John Tedesco, who talked community-wide process in his interview with me a month ago but came in firing last night, had a moment of clarity at a key point, albeit only after Goldman got through to him that things were dangerously out of control.
The Tedesco/Goldman moment came as the majority was preparing to obliterate the longstanding board policy on diversity, the major issue in the campaign. The five presented their resolution and, after a brief exchange, rejected by a 5-4 vote a motion by Keith Sutton, a board member in the pro-diversity minority, to refer the matter to the board’s policy committee.
Given that the resolution wasn’t on the meeting agenda, and no one had seen it before last night (and the majority brought no copies to share), sending it to a committee seemed a reasonable — no, obligatory — step.
The diversity policy, after all, is only the cornerstone of the system’s three decades of success, and maybe you don’t just want to toss it out without hearing a little discussion first?
But no, the majority voted as a bloc to plow ahead. On a 5-4 vote, it rejected Sutton’s motion. But with Goldman obviously uncomfortable, Tedesco called for a five-minute recess, and after the five huddled, they came back and reversed themselves, accepting Sutton’s motion unanimously.
By then, however, their dye was cast. They were bullies, but also weak. And the chance they’d had to bring their critics around to a consensual change process was out the door.
Four of the five, of course, are new members — and three are novices at holding public office. (Chris Malone is a former Wake Forest committeeman.) Maybe I’m going soft, but it’s possible for me to imagine that the three, at least, didn’t mean to strike a confrontational note, they simply blundered into it.
But the chair, Margiotta, isn’t new. He’s been a board member for six years, and it was his job — after his allies elected him — to set the proper tone. I’m no judge of whether he, too, blundered, or whether he thought belligerence was the right way to go. But Margiotta, who said little throughout the meeting, was obviously prepared to adopt every one of the eight resolutions on the spot until Goldman and Tedesco pulled back. He set the tone, all right, and his colleagues followed him off the cliff.
So what did the Board actually do, or not do, last night? A brief blow-by-blow will follow below the fold.
