Earlier this month, the Unionville-Chads Ford School Board unanimously approved amendments to its public complaint policy. This is the formal school policy that allows residents and parents to submit formal complaints about personnel and policy, and that used to require senior school officials to meet and confer with the complainant as part of the formal dispute resolution process. The former policy also required that complaints be resolved by a neutral fact finder. For example, if the superintendent and the school district’s lawyers were accused of misconduct or violations of law, the board would be responsible for meeting with the complainant and adjudicating the complaint, because any fair and impartial process would prohibit the accused from investigating themselves.
Although the amendments admittedly include a modest improvement (such as specific timeframes for a response), the bulk of the changes eliminate existing due process protections requiring an opportunity to be heard and a fair process by which a neutral party will investigate the complaint.
Why does this matter? Because if you are a parent and submit a complaint about harm to your children, the board just gave school officials the express authority to refuse to meet with you and, in certain cases, to allow the individuals accused of misconduct to investigate themselves. What is perhaps most disturbing is that during the many meetings at which the proposed amendments were “deliberated,” not one board member acknowledged that the district’s failure to follow existing policy is currently being investigated by state and federal authorities. In other words, the UCF school board just amended a policy to remove the very protections they are accused of ignoring in pending state and federal complaints.
Most taxpaying residents in the district appear willing to accept our lawless school board and senior administrators. But in a school district that has spent a year reminding everyone how much “kindness matters,” isn’t it a little curious that the same board unanimously amended its complaint policy to give themselves the right to ignore people they don’t like?
Chad Williams
Birmingham Township
