[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]What happened at last night’s School Board meeting is reprehensible, a painful lesson ahead of the next election.

Are you listening, Culver City voters?

Even though the next Board election is 15½ months away, November of next year, ponder the shocking embarrassment the next time you enter a booth to choose new members.

Are you listening, Steve Levin, Jeannine Wisnosky Stehlin and other leaders of United Parents of Culver City?

Fifty percent of the School Board wandered into the meeting and declared – without blushing – they, uh, had, uh, not, uh, done any preparatory work. Do they just travel from meeting to meeting without cracking a book? Agenda? What agenda?

Why not yank five schlemiels out of the audience every other Tuesday and have the new Super solemnly swear, “I pronounce you a School Board member for a night. When you are done, turn in your halo.”

That Prof. Pat Siever and retired teacher Nancy Goldberg – educators? – came to the meeting without having devoted 5 seconds in two weeks to a brief, easily accessible central item on a featherweight agenda is worthy of a penalty.

Both ladies know better.

Amazingly, neither gave an ounce of remorse.

We still are waiting.

These are mature ladies. These are not brash-faced teens sporting spiked orange and purple hair.

It Isn’t Lack of Experience

Between them, they have logged about 75 years in classrooms.

One still is teaching.

However, it is saddened, disappointed and hopefully wised-up voters who are doing the learning these days – not the teachers.

In their prime, I am confident that both ladies would have punished their students for blowing off easy homework assignments the way they just did.

The failure of the two ladies reminds me of the new Batman film, The Dark Night.

Stockton, How Do You Vote?

They could have hitchhiked to bankrupt Stockton last night, wandered into their School Board meeting and been equally prepared to render decisions that a community relies on elected officials to make.

How can voters know when these two members will take a cerebral powder again?

When these two Board members unilaterally decide which meetings they will prepare for and which ones they will ignore, the School District and new Supt. Dave LaRose are confronting a serious governing problem.

If either Ms. Siever or Ms. Goldberg had apologetically explained that her 14 nearest relatives suddenly had been stricken with the bubonic plague and that, drained, she has been dragging herself from bed to bed nurturing them, failing to catch more than winks, a man could feel sympathy.

In the absence of an apology or an excuse, here is my suggested penalty:

Ban Ms. Siever and Ms. Goldberg from the next six School Board meetings.

Since they did not prepare for last night’s meeting, no unique wisdom or worthwhile contributions will be sacrificed.

Would anyone notice the difference?