Onlookers at the September 4th Highline School Board meeting gasped audibly as directors, administrators, and the Superintendent tossed aside civility, attacking two new directors.
Highline School District board meetings have a long history of being scripted in advance, with tens of millions of dollars being spent with no public discussion or questions. With that background, the extreme contentiousness of the September 4th board meeting represents nothing less than a cataclysmic shift.
Two relatively recently elected board members, Directors Azeb Hagos and Melissa Petrini, have begun asking reasonable questions and requesting a modicum of transparency, thus enraging the old guard. Last night, insults and accusations flew their direction for nearly an hour.
For the past three years, Superintendent Duran has been able to rely on the support of a “friendly” board, including the President. This time, however, one of the three directors, Joe Van, was absent, setting the scene for a fractious, emotional meeting, at times lacking in the customary civility.
Typically, the Superintendent and Board President set the agenda. A consent agenda is a common time saving method to approve routine and noncontroversial items all at once, in order to avoid a long series of time-consuming individual votes. This time, two directors wanted to remove a single item. The rest of the consent agenda was acceptable.
Apparently, the board had met in executive session to discuss the Superintendent´s employee evaluation. That is proper, but two board members noted that the board had not had time to complete the evaluation and objected to it being finalized in its incomplete state. They wanted to discuss this item separately.
In a typical board or council setting, any member may have an item removed from the consent agenda so that it may be considered individually.
President Alvarez refused to go along with this, and the two board members responded by voting against the consent agenda. This created a procedural stalemate that lasted over an hour. Alvarez insisted on a series of roll call votes, resulting in two against two stand-offs.
When Alvarez could not gather consensus to pass the consent agenda item, she called for adjournment, which also failed. Directors Hagos and Petrini, who wanted further discussion, voted to “not adjourn” so that the “unpassed” consent agenda items would not affect daily operations and finances.
President Alvarez declared two recesses during the meeting in order to confer privately with the Superintendent. During the meeting, she repeatedly needed to ask the staff for help.
During the recesses, several of the community members and students were curious, “is this normal?” One person stated, “this is better than reality TV!” A long-time Highline employee commented that they had never seen a meeting this contentious in their 20 years of attending Highline Board meetings.
Nearing the two-hour mark, Director Stephanie Tidholm announced that she “had to leave,” and immediately departed, leaving the president with only her single vote against two opposing. Eventually, Alvarez capitulated and grudgingly agreed to schedule another executive session to discuss Superintendent Duran’s performance.
Alvarez was clearly flustered and annoyed at not getting her way, and stormed off at the end of the meeting.
Meanwhile, Hagos and Petrini stayed to answer questions from the public, including several speakers from the Skunkworks Robotics team.
