Re “What Was He Thinking?” and Re “Silbiger Response to Angry Parents”
Let's dial the rhetoric back for a moment.
There is no conspiracy here.
In the middle of my fulltime job as a teacher and my part-time job as a School Board member, I am not running a shadow, collusionary School District. I am not nearly as conniving (or powerful) as letter-writer Pat Williams (or whoever is writing under that name) is trying to make me out to be.
Pat is correct that I said yesterday “the School Board is in the early stages of considering this issue to make sure that we comply with all state and federal statutes and our collective bargaining agreement with our employees.”
He says that he looked at every agenda for the last 2-plus years to find the agenda item where this was discussed.
But he needed look no further than last night's agenda. Item 3.2 was the conference with labor negotiator for our classified union negotiations.
As everyone knows, this issue related to the adjuncts (a reference to the parents of El Marino Language School opposing unionization) is a negotiable item. It would, therefore, be an obvious topic for discussion in Closed Session with our staff, who are negotiating with the union.
That is on the agenda almost every meeting in order for the Board to give constant feedback to our staff on these types of issues. Obviously we would focus on following laws and our collective bargaining agreement. So no surprise there.
However, I did make one mistake in my email yesterday. I put my opinion on priorities in the email and couched them as “we.” I spoke with only one Board member regarding this email.
So there was no Brown Act violation.
I did correctly mention that no decisions had been made. However, I should have made clear that this was my opinion on how the Board and District would act. If that confused anyone, then I do apologize.
Thanks again to everyone for their continued feedback on this and other important issues. I look forward to going back to focusing on those issues and not divisive political attacks that don't help us to provide a better education for our students.
Mr. Silbiger, President of the School Board, may be contacted at ksilbiger@juno.com
