Board outlines process for speaking on ‘actionable items’
If you want to speak to the Anderson County Board of Education at its coming meeting, you’ll need to arrive early and fill out a form.
The meeting will be at 6 p.m. Thursday (July 11) at 101 S. Main St. on the top floor. Members of the Board of Education said at a work session on Monday, July 8, that they had gotten criticism for not allowing the public to speak at an earlier meeting during which the board discussed staff implicated in changing grades at Clinton High School. However, board Chairman Scott Gillenwaters said the rules for speaking had not changed, and the board was following them.
“They say that we did not allow anyone to talk, and no one had asked to talk,” board member Teresa Portwood said.
Gillenwaters said he planned to speak further on the issue of citizen comments on Thursday. It appears as an action item on the agenda for discussion purposes, even though no one on the board or staff has suggested changing it.
“We’re not putting up with it,” Gillenwaters said regarding the way people had portrayed the board as shutting down comments.
You can come early to the meeting and fill out a form regarding “actionable items.”
The agenda, available on the website acs.ac, lists agenda items for the June 11 meeting, and they include items like a greenhouse at Norwood Middle School, a playground at Dutch Valley Elementary School, policies on visitors to schools, school calendar, security, use of artificial intelligence programs, interscholastic activities, employees’ leave for injuries due to physical assault, the director of schools’ duties, zero-tolerance offences for students, suspension and readmission of suspended or expelled students, reporting child abuse, and the storage of treatments for opioids’ effects.
Potential speakers must go through a different process to discuss Items not on the agenda, however. The school system’s procedure requires anyone to go through “the proper administrative procedure” relevant to the issue, and if that doesn’t work, either email awest@acs.ac or call 865-463-2800 no later than a week before the board meeting. It’s too late for the July meeting to go through this process, but August is a possibility.
A non-action item on June 11 will be a presentation by MBI Companies regarding its design for a new elementary school in Claxton.
The board plans to hold a private executive session to further discuss the CHS grading scandal issues, and Director of Schools Tim Parrott said he hoped to address the public at the Thursday meeting.