the school board

The other interns and I went to a meeting of The Board of Trustees of The Oxford School District. It was sort of interesting to me because I have been to school board meetings in New York before. My father used to be the president of the District 27 School Board in so I have been to meetings, but it was more of being dragged to them (haha... but seriously.) The differences were interesting enough out here.

The main speaker to catch my attention was a Ms. Cynthia Bunch, a teacher who was very passionate about what she had to say. She was a teacher of the year multiple times in the past. She spoke of the discrepancies between the scores of black students and white students within the same schools. It was a very passionate speech, in which she called members of the board out by name and eventually got shut down. I found it interesting how they reacted to her. She did start to go over her time so I understand that, but they seemed very eager to ignore that and move on...

The politics of the school board were also of interest. The people running for positions were strictly the people who were already in the position. The nominations and voting for all began and ended in about a minute total. That was very different from how it was back in New York, where it was an actual election... but then again, that was a bigger school board i guess. The whole meeting did leave me feeling sort of odd however. There seemed to be a very old school mindset about the meeting. Ms Bunch described it as a “the good ol boy mentality” during her talk.

Later we spoke with  Ms Marian Barksdale, a member of the school board. She clarified some things, such as how all of the members still wanted the president to remain president. She also spoke of how some changes had already been made to the administrators of some of the schools that Ms Bunch was speaking of. She seems to be a great lady and I felt better about the meeting after meeting with her, but I still sort of feel that the truth is somewhere in the middle.