Update 2: So I have seen a message from President Liza Rankin on why she, Director Evan Briggs, and Director Michelle Sarju backed out of this meeting. In a nutshell: - She says there was no organization to the meeting which is just not true. They had a moderator lined up and naturally the board members could have set parameters for what to discuss, length of meeting, etc. All that was fleshed out. - She also claimed that if the meeting was PTA sponsored, they needed to have liability insurance to use the school space. Hello? PTAs use school space all the time and know they have to have this insurance. - She seems to be worried about the Open Public Meetings law. Look, if she has a meeting in a school building on a non-personnel topic, it should be an open meeting. It appears that Rankin is trying, over and over, to narrow the window of access that parents have to Board members. She even says in her message - "...with decisions made in public." Hmmm - She also says that th
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It's not necessarily related, but there is the tragic story of the nine-year old autistic boy who was killed a couple of days ago crossing Highway 99. The sheriff is quoted in today's paper as saying they had been to the house numerous times, that the boy was evidently "hard to control"...One wonders what support there was for this child, and whether the closure of the Viewlands program helped or hindered the cause of autistic children generally. As I said, I respectfully acknowledge that I don't know the details of the recent tragedy, and respect that the family is grieving...I wouldn't want to make "political" hay over this, but only suggest that it might point an intrepid reported towards an important (for better or for worse) story about how children with these sorts of needs are supported by their schools.