Report from Electioneering Committee, July, 12, 2007

I had the genuine pleasure of attending a meeting of the Electioneering Committee of the Rockwood School Board this past week. This board is chaired by Steve Banton, with Peggy Devoy and Mary Battenberg as members as well. At this particular meeting, only Steve and Peggy were there of the 3 board members, due to another commitment of Mary's. Also in attendance were several parents, the board lawyer, Kim Cranston (Director of Communications), representatives of the RNEA (teachers' union), and a few others I've missed here. As far as I could tell, there were only 2 non-members present.

Meeting purpose

The purpose of this meeting was to discuss the use of email through the district-owned domain, rockwood.k12.mo.us, for purposes of advocating election issues, including bonds and BOE candidates. In a previous meeting of this committee, they discussed use of other Rockwood resources for electioneering.

What brought this up?

This whole issue came up because of some events that transpired during the past board election season in April, 2007. Without going into explicit details about who did what and why they did it, the events in question involved emails sent by employees of Rockwood into the district email system and from the district email system, and potentially emails sent by BOE members into the email system (more about this last detail later). Even though there was a policy in place, it seems that this policy was ignored in the heat leading up to that election, and potentially reinterpreted after the election in a manner clearly not in the spirit of the rules. To prevent that from happening again, this committee was tasked clarifying the guidelines.

The discussions

The discussion centered around the ownership of the rockwood.k12.mo.us domain name, what the allowed use of the email system was with respect to advocating election-related issues, who the policy applies to, with a slight detour into consequences for violating these rules.

The underlying fact behind all of this, agreed to by all, is that rockwood.k12.mo.us is wholly owned by Rockwood. Every employee of the district is bound by the district's acceptable usage policy to refrain from electioneering using district-owned resources. This applies whether the resource is real, as in the case of copier or facilities, or virtual, as in servers, email systems, and the intra-net. This policy is necessitated by court rulings stating that public institutions cannot advocate election issues using public funds or things purchased with public funds. The lawyer explained this quite clearly, and it made perfect sense.

There is a special relationship, however, that teachers and their union have that allows for a different set of rules. This relationship is governed by a separate memorandum of understanding that the union has with the district. The teachers' union interviews and makes decisions about which of the candidates to support, and they are allowed to distribute this information to their teachers via email. They have done this in the past, and it only now seems to have become an issue. The representative of the union was pretty emphatic that this behavior was allowed, and the committee listened to his statements carefully.

Another point of contention was how these regulations and policies would affect district parents and other non-employees. They talked about this for a while and went around and around a bit. Part of the discussion centered around the use of filtering systems to refuse email containing keywords, like election and the like, but Mr. Banton quickly explained how that would be completely impractical. There is too large a chance of false positives, causing email between parents and teachers to be refused. Personally, I'm pretty sure that the district doesn't send me a paycheck, I'm pretty sure I have no business relationship with them, and I'm pretty sure that their regulations don't apply to me. I'm allowed to send email to anyone I please. They do have to keep the language in the policy to prohibit non-employees from using the email system for these purposes, to satisfy the letter of the law, but that part of the regulation is unenforceable on non-employees. Unfortunately, this leads directly to another problem...

So what do you suppose should happen if a member of the BOE were to send electioneering emails into the district email system? These are the people who set the policies that others should follow, these are the people who are supposed to set the example for all others to follow, these are the people for whom you voted (well, some of you, anyhow). The BOE members are not employed by the district, so they fall into the non-employee category, same as parents. So, yeah, they're not supposed to do it, but there is nothing that the district can do if they violate that part of the policy.

However, ethically and morally, there would be no excuse for a member of the board doing this. It would be ethically wrong, morally wrong, and would set a very bad example if a member of the Board of Education were to violate the very same policies that they put into place to govern the actions of those under them. These people were elected by the public to represent their interests to the school district, and they should be held to a high standard of behavior. Were I to discover an act like this, I would believe it to be my duty to expose such an ethical violation. You can't gain the respect of people if you live by a different set of rules than those that you've imposed on them.

If any board member happens to have done this, I truly hope that they feel shame, great amounts of shame. Unfortunately, the kind of person who would ignore their ethical responsibilities like this would also likely not have enough of a conscience to feel that shame.

Next Steps

There really were no definite conclusions reached tonight. This was a working meeting and, as such, created as many questions as answers. As issues were raised and discussed, changes were made in the prospective wording of section 0380 of Rockwood's policies. These changes have to be made and published to the committee so that they can be approved in their final form. The next meeting of the committee is on August 9th, where they should finalize some of the language of the policies and clarify some of the intent. After about 2 hours, the meeting was adjourned.

Side note

I enjoyed attending this meeting. Mr. Banton conducted it with quiet authority, respect for all participants, and a collaborative attitude. The committee members conducted themselves as I would expect an organization of professionals to act. There was discussion, there was listening, and there was critical thought. It was my pleasure to be a part of it.