I was taken aback the first time I walked into the boardroom of ISD 709 and found Keith Dixon elevated on the dais, actively nosing about in Board business. When the Mayor is in the council chamber (which is pretty rare) he sits off to the side and generally doesn’t say much. I’m fairly certain the city council would feel a barrier had been crossed if he waltzed in and took a seat next to the council President. I don’t think they’d welcome him tossing his 2 cents into their deliberations as though he were one of the gang. I can’t imagine the council President continually deferring to him: “Mr. Mayor, would you like to respond to what Councilor Fosle just said?”
The Superintendent is hired by the Board and is ostensibly the Board’s employee. The meetings in Old Central are supposed to be BOARD meetings, but the current head of Administration--Superintendent Gronseth--sometimes refers to them as “our meetings.”
The Superintendent may not have a vote during meetings, but he is inordinately deferred to. He also has a direct say in the most important aspect of Board business: setting the agenda. Since Mr. Dixon came to town, the Superintendent’s influence in the boardroom has grown. Administration, in collusion with majority members, disallows anything it doesn’t want to discuss from being discussed. Procedure around the Board’s agenda is so knotted up Board member Welty (who has served on Boards of the past) described the current situation as “rigged.”
For at least ten years now, a cadre of Board members (several of them past and current district employees) have been joined at the hip and in a lockstep march with Administration. Dissenting viewpoints have been muscled out by an overweening majority hegemony. The whole process--setting of the agenda and the running of the meetings--is tyrannically controlled. Current Chair Seliga-Punkyo recently described the way she views the rules applied in the boardroom this way: “As a Board, we are required by law to follow MN statutes…The second thing we follow is Board policy or practice. Practice it’s been, really, because some of our policies are out-of-date. And the third thing we--to keep a meeting moving--we do Robert’s Rules, but they are NOT a LAW.

The law is a living (and slippery) thing.
 
Whether the Board has conscientiously followed Minnesota Statutes (especially in regard to the Red Plan) is very debatable. Legitimate claims of noncompliance can be raised on a number of statutes. The first statute on this list is the big one, the one that allowed the Board to circumvent a public vote: MS 126C.40--Capital Levies. In my report to the State Auditor’s Office, I listed five more statutes I believed were not fully complied with, and that list was likely not comprehensive.
As far as Rob’s Rules go, anyone paying attention to Board meetings at all is well aware of the ruling majority’s penchant for twisting “Robert’s Rules of Order” into “Roberto’s Hot Salsa Recipe for Comic Disorder.” As the Chair put it, the Board’s catchall, fallback rule has been “practice.” The parliamentarian logic behind “practice” is roughly: “If any rule exists on the books that applies to this situation (and who knows or cares?), we haven’t followed it for so long, we don’t have to follow it anymore.”
During the March meeting, the Board majority, with administration assistance, pushed through the first reading of a change to Board policy 3215. The policy requires the Board to arrange with the State Auditor’s Office to audit the district’s budget every five years. The policy was meant to be another check and balance in the system, but hadn’t been followed for 21 years. Administration and the Board majority are going to throw out the language requiring the Board to request a State audit. It was laughable to hear Board Member Miernicki describe the pending change as “an improvement.”
 
Not the first improvement.
 
Five years ago, I exposed the fact that the Board wasn’t following bylaw 9020. As soon as I went public with the rule they were supposed to be following, Administration and the Board’s majority (then led by Chair Grover) put 9020 on the agenda of the next meeting and gutted it. None of the changes made were in the interest of good government or democracy. Language in the original bylaw directed the Board Clerk to “forward all (Board) correspondence to the Superintendent for assignment to a standing committee agenda.” In other words, citizen concerns expressed to the Board were given a pathway to the agenda--proper respect paid to the public’s voice. In the revised bylaw, two important changes were made. Correspondence from the public no longer went to the Board Clerk, but was now “received by Administration.” The wording was further changed so that citizen letters and all other correspondence addressed to the Board were forwarded to the “Superintendent for his/her review.”
No longer were the public’s concerns automatically channeled to standing committees for agenda consideration. The decision was now the Superintendent’s. An unelected bureaucrat had inserted between the public and its representatives.
The original language of bylaw 9020 was further altered by expunging a crucial right once granted to anyone elected to the Board: “All School Board members are entitled to place items for consideration on the agenda of any standing committee.”
If you want to trace the “rigged” process Member Welty has complained about to its source, here it is. The only reason this language was erased was so Mr. Dixon and his majority allies could establish full control over the Board’s agenda and quash all procedural obstructions to (and debate about) the Red Plan.
Last year, policies 9100 and 9070 were put on the Board’s agenda for review. The changes made to these policies raised the number of board members required to request Special and Committee of the Whole meetings from two to three. The Board’s majority made these changes to limit the ability of minority members (two or less, for ten years now) to participate in the process.
 
More improvements coming.

Administration is currently in the process of “reviewing” all Board policy. I believe it is inappropriate for administrative bureaucrats to be undertaking a task so intimately tied to the functioning of representative government. There is a real danger some changes will be made for the sole reason of weeding out rules the people controlling the boardroom don’t want to follow. Every change in policy language Administration recommends will likely by rubberstamped by the Board’s majority. Almost assuredly some of these changes will effectively limit debate and consolidate a tighter grip on power.
Good government is aided by rules that encourage and protect dissent. Many people, especially in the leadership ranks of this town, mistakenly believe the secret to restoring good government in ISD 709 is to eradicate all dissent--to have a Board that spends all of its time thanking administration and filling the boardroom with happy talk. A malleable, rubberstamping Board is exactly what has gotten us into the current mess. If Keith Dixon were in the boardroom with the people controlling the Board today, he would have an even easier time being Alpha Dog.
We may as well save taxpayer money and replace our representatives with the cheerleading squad from Duluth East: “Go, Mr. Superintendent! You’re our hero, you’re our hero! RAH! RAH! RAH!”