One year ago this spring, Newberg neighbors worked together to change our community’s future. Having decided that an alt-right school board was dismantling a once-vibrant school district, people combined their energy, their resources, and their gifts to successfully elect five new board members. After months of collaborative labor, a slate of non-partisan candidates was sworn in last June, and over the last year, those folks have been working to restore our community’s faith in its schools, and to provide Newberg’s children the education they deserve.
Truthfully, many of us were tired after the election. We’d done the work, expending emotional capital attending school board meetings and providing public comments in a space that sometimes seemed like a right-wing political convention. We’d knocked on doors, phone banked, talked to friends and family, and provided campaign funds. And when the new board was elected, we felt like we could exhale: those new school board members were competent, ethical, and collaborative.
Now more than ever, though, those school board members need our support, as do the educators in Newberg who continue to face toxic work environments, thanks in part to district office leadership who was hired by the previous board; and are paid very well because of contracts codified by the previous board; and who has demanded loyalty from others in the district, often at significant emotional and fiscal cost to employees being bullied into silence.
There are specific actions that people can take to support the current school board, the district’s teachers, and its families:
- Attend the school board meeting on Tuesday night, and provide public comment. We are aware that people highly critical of the current board will be attending, and will be providing comments. Voicing another narrative, focused on the good work of our board and teachers, will give ballast to these negative comments.
- The Parents’ Rights Policy is once again on the agenda for Tuesday. Note that the policy bears little resemblance to the discussions convened last spring, during which 60 community members argued for a parents’ rights policy that addressed the needs of all children. Parents’ rights policies in other states, like Florida’s Don’t Say Gay Bill, too often focus on the rights of heteronormative, white families, rather than recognizing the need for all parents to have a say in what rights they are granted.
- The Chehalem Online Academy (COA) program is also on the meeting agenda for Tuesday, and we’ve received credible information that the essential program is also on the chopping block, despite its success in reaching children who, for whatever reason, cannot attend all-day school in person, including a number of homeschool families. According to some, the reasoning behind axing COA is fiscal, though the costs for online instruction are minimal, and the decade-old program has been fiscally sound in the past. (In fact, part of the new construction at Catalyst was intended for COA, which makes us wonder why the superintendent has decided to cut the program now, after money has already been spent on infrastructure, and when–by their own admission–more families in the district are choosing homeschooling.)And, more broadly, although budget reports from the district office have been glowing, there’s a sense that everything is not as it seems, especially since nearly every other school in the state is facing significant budget cuts.
- Lindsay Hayden, a 5th grade teacher at Joan Austin Elementary school, has requested a public hearing following a parent complaint, her suspension as a teacher, and then a contentious meeting with the superintendent and the human resources director. Lindsay has asked that her story be told, and that people attend the hearing (happening at the meeting) to support her. She feels her marriage to Jeremy Hayden, a current board member, has made her a target for retribution, from both district office staff and parents who were happy with her work–until her connection to Jeremy was made. Lindsay’s journey from being nominated for a “Special Educator of the Year in Oregon” award, to being suspended, to being offered a demotion, to having her role with the district terminated has all happened in less than three months, raising questions about what is really going on.
- The entire ordeal reveals a haphazard hiring and firing process in the district, where teachers are given verbal agreements and handshakes, with meetings that sometimes feel threatening, especially when a superintendent and human resources person use yelling and intimidation as a strategy for adjudicating complaints.
- Similarly, the current school board needs access to other complaints that have too often been handled only by the superintendent and human resource persons. We know of at least four BOLI complaints made in the past six months, but none of those have been presented to the board, and we are not even sure the current board knows about complaints made about the superintendent and the human resources director intimidating employees, compelling some to take leave because the work environment has been so hostile.
Why isn’t the school board allowed to address these complaints publicly? What is the superintendent and his right-hand man trying to hide? Their unwillingness to address the challenges our district is facing, or to paper over any problems with toxic positivity, suggests that the district isn’t being well run, which is surprising, given that our superintendent is one of the highest paid administrators in the state.
Given the considerable resources he’s being allotted by our tax dollars, it seems like we should have one of the best school districts in the state as well. We don’t know where we stand, though, because there hasn’t been any audits, any evaluations, any sense of what this leadership is doing right.
Hopefully, with more parental support, those things can be brought to the light. It’s time for the public who supports this board to show up, starting tomorrow night (March 12).
Newberg Neighbors for a Better Community 