School board needs to follow best procedures

The Webutuck Central School District’s Board of Education (BOE) did a disservice to its students and the surrounding community when it hastily pushed through a tenure recommendation for high school Principal Kenneth Sauer this past week. Some members of the school board had reservations about Sauer’s treatment of students in the high school after a petition of nearly one-third of the student body showed that it felt students are not treated equally by the principal.

Those complaints, along with other similar misgivings about Sauer, gave school board members Joe Herald, Dale Culver and John Perotti reason to pause and try to discuss the matter at this past Monday’s BOE meeting. Yet the three members were met with an obstacle when the remaining four board members supported a motion to grant tenure to Sauer.

At that point, Herald asked for an executive session, but his request was not successful. The superintendent said the motion to give Sauer tenure was already on the table, so it must be acted upon. Shame on him and the other four board members for agreeing to that statement. They could just as easily have tabled the motion and satisfied Herald’s request for an executive session. Instead, the motion was seconded and then carried through with a vote of four-to-three.

Granted, Herald, Culver or Perotti could have moved to table the motion too, but according to them they didn’t move quickly enough to do so, which is unfortunate.

Now, this paper is not stating that Sauer is not worthy of tenure — that discussion would have been best left to a BOE executive session, as is any personnel matter. If the claims of unfair treatment are true, then the matter should also be held up for public scrutiny so that it can be corrected, and quickly. But the real issue here is that several board members did not allow Herald his discussion in executive session; rather, they rammed through the motion to grant Sauer tenure with a slim majority.

What is also disheartening is that it would appear the majority of the board entered the March 19 meeting with the matter practically decided, even though it was not supposed to be discussed at that meeting (the meeting was initially only supposed to address the budget). The BOE had decided at its March 12 meeting that it would discuss the tenure issue in April, among all board members. Now that discussion will never be. The question is, did some members confer with each other between the March 12 and the March 19 board meetings outside of the board room? If a quorum of the board did so that spells real trouble, as it would be illegal. All we know at this point is that the majority of the board did not try to foster any kind of open communication with the minority of the board, to come to a decision that would best suit the students and the district.

This is not conducive to the openness that the board reportedly strives to achieve. Instead it reeks of closed-door talks, secret handshakes and silent winks... none of which contribute to the level of comfort and confidence one would wish to have with his or her school district.