26 May 2016
Second-guessing superintendents is a school trustee’s job
Preface. Although I disagree with the decision of School District 5’s board of trustees to ban 20 seniors from participating in the graduation ceremony for the Class of 2016, I do not question the sincerity of any of the trustees. Although I believe the majority made a bad decision, I have no doubt that all were trying to do the right thing.
Commentary. I do, however, fundamentally disagree with the approach to service on the board that trustee Don Murray articulated:
While trustee Don Murray said he personally might have distinguished between levels of involvement for each student and dispensed consequences accordingly, he saw his role as a trustee to ensure administrators completed a thorough investigation and support an appropriate recommendation, which he did.
“My role, in my view, as a school board trustee is to ensure the administration has gone about the investigation appropriately that they have investigated the matter throughly and the recommendation they make is within the sideboards of what is fair and just and legal,” Murray said. “It may not be the one I would make. I might make a different one. I might single out certain students for harsher punishment and lenient with others, but it’s not my role to substitute my judgment for that of the administration. [InterLake]
Wrong.
There are times when trustees must be willing to substitute their judgment for that of their school district’s administrators. An administrator’s decision making process must be defensible, but that alone is not sufficient. The decision itself must be the right decision. If not, the trustees have the power and duty to reverse that decision, substituting their judgment for that of the administrators. To argue otherwise betrays a profoundly anti-democratic approach to serving as an elected official.