Last night’s School Committee Meeting replaced openness and transparency with secrecy to avoid scrutiny - by Bill Lacey

There’s a reason why we, as a civilized and knowledgeable population, raise Ungulates as a primary source of protein in the form of meat. Ungulates (sheep, cattle and other even-toed mammals) have one interesting trait in common with one another. When led to their death for the purposes of sustaining our dietary needs, they go quietly and without complaint. Having grown up in the State of Vermont, I admit to having been present at more than one such occasion. It is a strangely peaceful affair, over in an instant and without the utterance of sound. Speaking candidly, it is this last image that remains with me today. The memory of a yearling, bound loosely with a rope, staring into the face of those who raised it, now positioned closely with a blade, a pistol or a stunbolt device and expecting a handful of grain…

It is, instead, a final breath that awaits…

No wonder we have elected to raise Ungulates as opposed to, say, Panthera (lions and tigers) or Ursidae (bears). Oh, my..! Think of the sheer terror in our American slaughter houses if, for example, one were to face a 500 lb. African lion or 600 lb. grizzly. Likely we’d be eating a lot more tofu…

There’s the set-up, folks… We raise those animals we can easily slaughter. Those that can be butchered with little fanfare. Quietly. Behind closed doors. My guess is Hormel, ConAgra and other suppliers of American meat products might founder a bit in their third quarter revenue if we were to suddenly broadcast the butchering of livestock. So we don’t… Publicly, at least.

So it was this evening (4/3/12) at the Special Meeting of the New Bedford School Committee as they took up the matter of Dr. Mary Louise Francis’ future in our city’s school system. The New Bedford School Committee, by a vote of six (6) to one (1) chose to leave public session and retire to their slaughterhouse for the sole purpose of avoiding scrutiny. Only Atty. Tom Clark found himself in possession of a pair, and cast the lone dissenting vote to remain in public session.

When the New Bedford School Committee took up the matter of Portia Bonner’s future with the city school system, they did so publicly. She had chosen to approach the job as that 600 lb. grizzly and they came armed with .308 caliber rifles and the ever faithful .30-06. She wasn’t going down easy, was she, folks? Remember? Remember the parking lot incident? The Hayden-McFadden public forum? Do you? Total firepower was the method of choice.

Tonight was different. There was no prey. No sport. No growl, no fierce creature, no fight. Instead, I watched silently, my anger building towards a group of people who had lost complete sight of the very definition of Public Servant as they cast their lots. And skulking away to the safety of the executive session, they prepared their stunbolts.

The number of citizens who came to this hastily called meeting outnumbered the school committee members by an exponential factor. What they witnessed, I’m sad to report, was a return to business as usual in the City of New Bedford. That open and transparent method of conducting the “people’s business”, pioneered by past New Bedford Mayor Scott Lang, had swiftly been replaced by that same closed-door, closed-mouth system that brought us to this moment.

Whether tomorrow arrives to a dismissed school superintendent, a weakened system or the dawn of some Brave New World means little to me. I have seen the future and it must be made short…

This same group, save for one sitting member, recently gave Dr. Mary Lou Francis a very favorable evaluation. She had been hailed for restoring order to a system whose leadership had created ill will among every group she had oversight of, and a community who had become fractured. Dr. Francis quietly began a process of fence mending while restoring belief among her teaching force that a better day was possible by working in sync. If numbers were the only measure one could apply to this process, we should easily see that a rise in scores, coupled with a simple message of “coming to school, staying in school”, has profited our system. If our national economic system had seen a similar rise in profitability, the world would have beaten a path to our shores.

No, my friends, there’s more of gravy than of grave about this.

If numbers were the only thing being paid attention to, then I have a set of numbers for you. 9,876 and 9,039. These are not the random coordinates of some farflung Starbucks in Dubai. They are not the total number of radioactive isotopes floating about the unstable compounds in our solar system. They have a far more fundamental meaning to you and I. They are, to be sure, the total number of votes cast for each candidate in the most recent mayoral race in the city of New Bedford. Separated by a mere 837 votes, New Bedford now has its most recent unknown running things from William Street as though it were a landslide. Let me break it down further… In terms of percentages (and let’s face it, this whole matter is being fed to us as though it were ALL about percentages…), New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell is the ex-officio chair of the NBPS School Committee because of a difference of 4.425%. But in reality, a swing of only 419 votes would have sufficed. THAT percentage amounts to 2.215%.

So why then would a man choose to create a campaign sure to alienate the electorate, create dissention among the largest group of city employees and chance his own political failure? That’s a great question for another day. Perhaps Mayor Mitchell and the other members of the NBPS school committee haven’t noticed the group of lions waiting for them after they finish with the lambs…

Bill Lacey is a member of the New Bedford Educators Association.