Should you want to view the agenda for tonight's board meeting, you might notice that it's not easily visible. From the Board Agenda page click or tap on Please note: Starting with July 24, 2023, the School Board public meeting agenda packets will be housed on boarddocs.
Here's where the transparency falls apart.
Too many clicks. The board agenda used to be one document that readers could scroll through. Now, readers must click a minimum of 43 times to get from the top to the bottom of the document.
Sneaky additions to the agenda. The board will often post their agenda on Friday afternoon, revamp the agenda over the weekend, slipping in items at the last minute in an effort to avoid scrutiny. Sharp readers will note this but with the new system, any last minute additions will go virtually undetected, just the way the board intends.
Boarddocs is it's own site and "protects" information from being searchable via Google.The Boarddocs are not indexed on Google the way other websites are. For example, let's do a Google search for the new "Director of Assessment & Accountability wcasd". You can see the job posting here on page 3. But you won't find anything on Google about this because Boarddocs obscures board documents in part or whole from Google searches. And if you do happen to find a Boarddocs link in a Google search, you won't be able to share it, nor copy/paste the information contained within Boarddocs. It is klunky and it not meant to be shared. (PS: Is this job a new position or is the Director of Equity now going to be the Supervisor of Assessment and Accountability?)
Boarddocs are not searchable within the document itself. If you want to search for something that happened during a board meeting, you used to be able to open the agenda and search the document using "Command + F." But now? Good luck, you're going to have to open 17 different documents, some of which are searchable and some of which are not.
If you are tired of a school board who refuses to uphold transparency, then let them know on November 7th and vote them out of office. Back to Basics candidates --when elected to the board-- will listen to and partner with parents, and will uphold transparency.
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