Is It Deliberate or Deliberate?
After our discussion in class night, I thought about the impending Deliberative Sessions taking place around our state. It occurred to me that there is a distinction between Deliberate (discussing key issues honestly and civilly) and Deliberate in the sense of deliberate action to derail or prevent something from happening. While the Deliberative Session has been designed as an opportunity for open dialogue about the size and scope of school budgets, it is sometimes used as a deliberate and obtuse attempt to derail the budget. It's not that this has anything to do with ED678, but something that I thought of on the way home from class and after having received an email relative to a deliberative session held last night in a neighboring community. The unfortunate part of all of this is that when attendance is low, the likelyhood of an informed citizenry is greatly diminished. Therefore, what happens after the session is as equally or even more important than the meeting itself. The sancity and anonyminity of the voting booth lets ill-informed citizens determine the future of the school system without benefit of deliberation. In this instance the negative connotation of deliberate can be used to confuse the electorate; consequently the school system may be diminished by those intent on using their influence to bring folks to the polling place without benefit of thoughtful discussion and dialogue.
No one asked......just my thought for today!
Dr. Moody
In all the years I've been hearing about and attending "deliberative sessions" I've never thought about the two meanings of the word... I have noticed however that the formality of the process that these meetings sometimes follow can/has been used to confuse the electorate citizens and teachers in the audience often don't know when it will be their turn to speak or how/if they need to get on the agenda beforehand. Certainly the formality of this process doesn't allow for true deliberation of the issues at stake and can really hinder a community and district from coming together.
ReplyDeleteOne does need to know the process of the session. Community members need to attend the previous meeting where what is at stake is made public (what is the proposed budget, what makes up that budget, what are "new" expenses, what is being cut and more). Several years back HMS was to eliminate a teaching position in grade 5. I had a daughter entering grade 5 - her class had at that time 125 students. 25 students per a class was the HSD "limit". I was aware that at that grade level it was not unusual for the class size to slowy increase. To get to the point, a bunch of us rallied, had an amendment to the budget stating that if the enrollment for grade 5 did exceed 125 the district would hire an additional grade 5 teacher. The amendment passed, it became part of the "budget" and of course 2 days prior to school opening for the fall we had 127 students so they hired an additional teacher. (The teacher had not been "cut", the position was not filled upon a retirement.)
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