How Do We Get the BOE to Respond

It is clear that a large part of the frustration so many community members have with this budget process is due to the perpetual silence on the part of both the BOE and administration regarding issues that have been put in front of them for months.One BOE member, in response to a question about the web forum where people can post their comments pointed out that she had over 600 in her mailbox and that they were working on a way to electronically post responses.

In all honesty who wants to wait for this technology and why should we? The forum for responses are the publicly attended BOE meetings. I do not mean that the BOE or Rosario need to respond to each of our points, comments and questions as they come up in public comment. However, it IS THEIR RESPONSIBILITY to include their responses to consistently asked questions in their agenda. As examples:

Top Heavy Administration
People have been asking publicly and through the web site for the BOE to take a harder look at administration and ways to consolidate/reduce the budget there. So far, in December, Gail said that the BOE did look at that but provided not further detail and last Tuesday we were only told that Rosario provided evidence that we are no different from the other districts in the County. Besides these responses obfuscating or falsifying the reality of our top-heavy administration, why is it three months after the first public mention (that I am aware of) of this issue has the BOE not presented any of these findings related to this issue in response to the public questioning?

Protection of TA's and Paraprofessionals
There has been numerous public comments about the protection of those in our district who get paid the least but yet are instrumental to the children's educational experience. Is the BOE and the Administration doing all it can to protect as many of these workers as possible? We do not know because they never make mention of this issue publicly.

Line by Line Auditing
Another consistent question is how much of a line by line auditing is the BOE doing. We get a two-faced response where neither face says anything at all. Len Berg says the BOE is doing a zero-based approach (start at nothing and add only needed items) - but there has been no documentation or further discussion of this. On the other side, another BOE member said that this is not their job, that they trust Rosario and his administration to do this. Yet we are shown no evidence that Rosario is working on the budget with this type of detail either.

I do not know how to get the BOE and Rosario to publicly respond, to provide transparency, to address these issue directly and in detail. I do know that until they do, the public will only become angrier and angrier with them.