GGO reporter Sam Hieb stayed for the whole Board of Education meeting last night.  At 2:22a he filed an account of a surprising development that was not covered by this morning's N&R's coverage of the meeting.  The vote Sam witnessed was taken long after the N&R had been gone to press.

Sam contends that the ABC group might be "furious" because such an important vote was taken in the wee hours.  They had every opportunity to stay but the group's current spokesman Michael Murphee left before I did last night.

As the N&R article reports, Murphee had asked the board earlier to take "a responsible course of action" on the High Point Choice Plan.  That's exactly what some members of the Board tried to do according to Hieb, even though the measure failed.

In my view, getting a school ready for students who will be arriving in 30 days is a "responsible course of action".  It just isn't the course that ABC might have wanted.

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I had something to say before the Board of Education again last night but was a bit tardy arriving... again.  The cut off time for signing up to speak from the floor is 6:45 for the 7:00 meeting, I arrived at 6:46.  Maria was already there with a N&R photographer.

After pleading with the keeper of the sign-up cards to no avail I mentioned to Board chair Allen Duncan that I had something say but had missed the cut-off by a minute.  He said, "oh, come on - you can speak", and motioned for the gate keeper to provide a sign-up card.  But I didn't get to speak my peace (or is it piece?)...

The Board allows 45 minutes before each meeting for speaker-from-the-floor.  At three minutes per speaker that's 15 citizens.  Anyone who does not fit into that time frame is still welcome to address the Board but must wait until the end of the meeting to do so.  I was fourth of the five remaining speakers so they would have had to extend the input session another 15 minutes to accomodate everyone.  Normally their meetings wind down at oh-my-God o'clock and I am sure they are all ready to get the hell out of there by then.

Since, contrary to some perceptions, the members of the Board are human - a speaker from the floor who waits around to speak around the time Ted Koppel is getting his make-up on will probably be listened to politely - but not heard. 

I didn't stay for the entire meeting after it ensued, but left around 9:00 to take daughter Josie to a promised visit to Fisher's Grill.  We returned around 10:00 just in time to hear a lively discussion about how hot the hot water needs to be in our schools.  

I noticed that Maria considered the hot water discussion fascinating too because she did her scribbling thing during that portion of the meeting.  I asked how she was going to fit hot water regulations into the story she was working on.  She replied, "Sidebar."

As enthralling as those discussions were, the promise of the next two agenda items on custodial services and the budget just didn't hold the same appeal for me.  We finally left around 10:30.

Thanks go to Chairman Duncan for his sense of fair play, but a plague to the Board for their unwillingness to go into speaker-from-the-floor-overtime at the start of the meeting.  They will not know until the next meeting that I have the answer to all of the discipline problems within the system.

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