At the Marshall Public Schools Board of Education meeting Nov. 8 in the Marshall Middle School Auditorium, board members had their first chance to discuss the failed $45.6 bond proposal that was defeated Nov. 2 by a 2 to 1 margin. Trustee Amanda Lankerd had offered a framework of sorts moving forward to engage members of the community that had voted no to see if a common ground could be reached.
The idea would be to invite members of the group, “Important Parents of Marshall Public Schools,” who were against the bond, to a meeting with the board which would be open to the public to hear the group’s concerns.
“The thought was maybe to invite 10-15 people and set up ground rules to make sure we can talk and listen to each other in a respectful way”… with no personal attacks, disrespect, name calling, etc.,” said Board President Richard Lindsey.
The meeting would discuss the following types of questions:
*What are your aspirations for your kids/grandkids?
*What are the two to three most important issue for you when it comes to education?
*When it comes to capital improvements of the district’s facilities, what do you think are the most important and necessary needs?
*What do you think we collectively can do to address the facility needs?
*What do you think needs to be in the bond proposal and what should be done differently in order for voters to support the bond?
“I think this would be a really good framework for us to engage in this,” said Lindsey. “We really missed the mark on a number of things, according to the voters. If we’re going to try again, we need to figure out how to do it differently and better.”
Trustee Matt Davis said he believed there was “some interest” in a town hall style session as well.
“I would suggest there would be a couple of them – at least one in each community… in addition to the ones a little bit more targeted to the people who were really active and involved in being concerned about the bond,” said Davis. “I would also like to see, and I can’t dictate it, but the board can, is to have (Interim Superintendent) Becky (Jones) begin doing some small group meetings so she can get feedback from people on what some of the issues are who might not feel comfortable talking in an open forum.”
Trustee Dr. Carrie Nicholson said she thought the “smaller, informal groups are going to be more effective with people being open and honest about what they’re saying.”
“There are certainly a lot of people that have a lot of angst that ended up voting no, and didn’t feel good about voting no,” said Nicholson.
Jones said she had “reached out” to people to begin a dialogue.
“I’m starting some one-on-one meetings that need to happen and I’m asking those people to kind of branch out from there and then we’ll branch out to meetings of four or five,” said Jones. “We’ll continue to work with people to hear as much community input that I can get and then report back to the board as I move along through those meetings.”
Lankerd suggested that there should be a way for people to share their thoughts via a written document in the event they don’t feel comfortable sharing “negative things” in public.
“We can put together a document to distribute where people can attend a meeting and be able to write down their thoughts,” she said.
Lindsey pondered how to get people to engage in the process.
“We had, what I thought to be a pretty resounding defeat,” he said, admitting that he thought more people would show up to the meeting to talk about the bond issue and asking what the board was going to do differently. “How do we get the “no” people that were strongly opposed?”
Lankerd commented that community engagement is not a “one and done thing.”
“You don’t say, ‘yay, we’ve arrived – we have engaged the community and now we can go out and do things,’” she said. “We need to go out, engage the community, take that (feedback), put it into actual things, do the things and then say, hey, did we get it right?’ It’s constant cycle of ‘We listened. This is what we got out of it. This is what we did as a result of it. Did we get it right?’”