Some members of the OPRF District 200 Board of Education are questioning whether the Community Council is still relevant today.
The council, founded in 1968 under a different name, the Citizens Council, was designed to serve as a sounding board for school officials.
But the Feb. 22 comments questioning the surprised and apparently alarmed the leaders of the Community Council, which serves as advisory group for the school – so much so, that a meeting was quickly arranged among its three leaders, Superintendent Greg Johnson and the two school board members, Tim Brandhorst and Audrey Williams-Lee, who are the liaisons to the council. That meeting took place on Feb. 28, six days after the school board meeting.
On Feb. 22, the board was discussing school groups and reevaluating whether school board members should continue to attend the meetings of various organizations, including the Community Council. One of the board liaisons typically attends each of the Community Council’s meetings.
Board members questioned whether the Community Council was representative of the OPRF community.
“I don’t know that it is broadly representative of our community, and it takes up a lot of time of the administration,” said Audrey Williams-Lee, a past member of the Community Council. Williams-Lee said that the Community Council seems to have changed from when she was a member of it nearly a decade ago.
Brandhorst, also a past member of the Community Council, wondered whether the Community Council was even needed these days.
“There are lot of ways to talk to the board and talk to the administration,” Brandhorst said.
Brandhorst also suggested that some members of the Community Council might overstep their bounds.
“This is a group that does not have a defined mission and that manifests that every year there are a number of members of the Community Council that treat it as an oversight committee and they think that the purpose of it is to grill the administration about a number of topics,” Brandhorst said. “It’s really problematic and my sense of it is that’s it’s become an enormous time sink of the administration.”
Hearing this, board member Graham Brisben described the Community Council as lacking both mission and purpose, and suggested that the board might want to suspend having members attend its meetings while the Community Council figures out what its purpose is.
The comments clearly alarmed the leadership of the Community Council and a meeting with Brandhorst, Williams-Lee and Superintendent Greg Johnson was quickly arranged. No one who attended the meeting wanted to talk to the Wednesday Journal about it. Those attending from the Community Council were leaders Mark Jackson, Michelle Siu and Cara Carmody.
Neither members of the Community Council leadership nor the school board members responded to a request for an interview from the Wednesday Journal.
“I really don’t have anything to share on this one,” Johnson said in a text message.
But Jackson, a Black man who is the co-chairman of the Community Council, and the other leaders of the Community Council sent an email to members on March 2 that was obtained by the Wednesday Journal.
“We expressed our disappointment over such remarks being made in a public venue without the board ever expressing their concerns directly to the Community Council,” Jackson wrote. “Especially since the Community Council exists solely at the pleasure of the superintendent.”
But Jackson added that the Community Council leaders left the meeting with a better understanding of the concerns of the school board members.
“Having heard their public statements and addressed them privately, we recognize there is room for growth and are committed to working alongside the board of education to align with their goals,” Jackson wrote. “As an example of our effort, in the last year, we recruited 24 diverse new members, and worked with the administration to deliver timely, meaningful topics for discussions. This led to wonderful presentations from the amazing staff and administrators at OPRF, and a feeling of accomplishing our mission this year.”
Jackson also asked Community Council members to show their support of the Council to the school board. He asked Community Council members to come to the March 7 school board meetings and make public comments at the meeting in a show of support and solidarity. The email also asked members to make suggestions about how to ensure that the Community Council continues to exist.
The Community Council is made up of 45 to 59 members who are appointed by the Board of Education to two-year terms. According to its bylaws, the purposes of the Community Council are to encourage community and parent awareness of the high school, to promote an interchange of ideas, to be available to the Board of Education for advice, discussion and study and to be available to the administration for any issue they present to the Council. The Community Council does not take action.
People are nominated for membership and must be approved by the school board.
One member of the Community Council, who asked not to be identified because he is the parent of current student and does not want his comments to impact his child, told the Wednesday Journal that he suspects that board members may not like the sometimes-tough questioning school officials get at Community Council meetings.
“It feels as if the board and administration have somewhat singled us out because we ask meaningful, tough, thought-provoking and yes sometimes not so flattering questions of our leaders,” the Community Council member said in an email.
School board president Tom Cofsky said no decisions have been made about whether the school board liaisons will continue to attend Community Council meetings.
“We are reviewing what the roles and expectations that we have for our board members on the 20 or so different organizations, committees that we’re involved in,” Cofsky said. “We’re going through that so that we can assure that our time is put to its greatest use and so that we can make sure that board members that are involved understand what is expected of them.”