By The Other Noise
In August, Evergreen Public Schools announced the formation of a Facilities Review Committee (FRC) charged with recommending schools for closure. Transparency has been a challenge from the start.
At the September 16 committee meeting, members were given several options to close elementary schools and one middle school. On September 18, before the minutes and slides were available on the FRC website, the EPS Advocate had the list of schools. When EPS finally sent out an official announcement on September 21, it did not include the list of schools, instead instructing the community to visit the FRC website, where that information is buried in the September 16 documents I linked above.
It’s an odd communication strategy: make the proposed closure list available in places where vocal EPS critics, like EPS Advocate, are likely to look. And then let those folks control the narrative, by posting that info on Facebook and other places where the wider EPS community are more likely to find it.
But it must be working, because they did it again.
At the October 19 committee meeting, FRC members learned that Burnt Bridge Creek was added to the closure scenarios (see slide 22). As of the morning of October 23, there has been no public announcement. I’m not part of the BBC community, so if those folks received an update, I wouldn’t know about it. But for the rest of us, knowing that another school can be added to the potential closure list at any time, with no notice, is quite unnerving.
If this process is open to update, can we add transparency–true transparency, not just info buried on a public website–to the committee’s guiding principles?
Don’t make us peek through the FRiCking windows. Pull back the curtain and show us what’s really going on.
Image caption: Three schoolgirls, satchels on their back, peeking through a window somewhere in Elten. The Netherlands, 1959. Flickr Commons link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nationaalarchief/3895374119/
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