School boards shouldn't limit the voice of those who voted them into office | Opinion

School board members are elected to run a public structure - the school district - that many people in a community rightly have opinions about and interact with almost daily for nine months of the year.

Schools are at the heart of a community, especially small and rural communities like Silverton.

That’s why it’s not only one of the most important elected offices, but also one of the toughest elected offices you can hold in Oregon.

For example, while few people can describe what the state treasurer or secretary of state oversees and does, many in the community have strong opinions about what their school board does and how well their schools are doing.

With so many constituents interacting with the district every day for so much of the year, board members’ communication with constituents is important if board members are to be effective community leaders and public officials.

Before email, when a parent or taxpayer wrote a board member, their letters would land at the district office where a staff person would decide who should receive and respond to the correspondence and who should not.

Today, with email, people are able to bypass the district filter, and contact their board members directly.

Some of the correspondence board members receive is better handled by school administrators and teachers. But even those emails provide important insight into constituent experiences and concerns which then can help board members when deliberating about school district policies and overseeing the superintendent.

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Communications from constituents make for a better and more effective board member and district.

So, I was shocked when I learned the Oregon School Boards Association (OSBA - www.osba.org) is suggesting to school boards across the state that they should stop publishing board members’ district email addresses on the districts’ webpages and instead post a single address which will direct all constituent emails to an administrative assistant who will decide who should read it - the full board, an individual board member, a teacher, an administration manager or staff person.

The OSBA says they want to go back to the “old school” way of handling correspondence to protect board members from being burdened by issues that OSBA believes are best left to school superintendents and their staff. 

Fair enough. But those types of emails can and are forwarded on to administrators.

School boards and the OSBA should not make it more difficult for the public to directly reach their elected officials.

In addition to negatively affecting public participation in their schools, OSBA’s suggested change makes no provision for reporting to the elected board members on the nature of email complaints and comments or whether the issues raised in correspondence were properly addressed.

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In short, OSBA is trying to clip the wings of elected board members while simultaneously shoring up the power of superintendents (the board members’ employee) and undermining public participation in school district affairs.

School boards should be doing all they can to make it easy to hear from constituents, instead of adopting short-sighted policies that limit the voice of the people who voted them into office.

I hope the Silver Falls School District board – and other school boards in Oregon – will say “no” to OSBA.

Being a school board member is hard work, and the last thing they need is less involvement from constituents or a power play by superintendents and other administrators.

Chuck Sheketoff lives in Silverton. You can reach him at chuck.sheketoff@gmail.com