“May you live in interesting times” is how the old Chinese curse goes, and nothing better describes last week’s meeting of the Hedley School Board of Trustees than “interesting.”
Word had earlier in the day reached the Enterprise that Athletic Director Darrell Wallace had been “non-renewed” during the previous board meeting, but that in and of itself didn’t raise any red flags with us. Coaches are, after all, “non-renewed” all the time across Texas.
But then we asked for the minutes of the March meeting and learned they were “unavailable.” That got this newspaper’s interest, and it got the editor on the road for the next meeting.
Is Darrell Wallace a good man or a good coach? Never having met the man until last Tuesday, your humble editor can’t answer that question with any direct knowledge.
What this column can answer though is that the public and the press have a right to see the minutes of any of our local boards, and it doesn’t matter whether those minutes have been “approved” by said board or not. Once the board’s secretary puts pen to paper in taking the official minutes that becomes a public record subject to the Texas Public Information Act (also known as the Open Records Act).
The minutes were again asked for during the meeting, but our representative was not given those minutes. But more troubling than that was the attitude exhibited by some board members that the public and certainly the media was not entitled to know why Coach Wallace had been dismissed. Board member James Edwards Potts even went so far as to say that he didn’t “have much use for any of the Donley County media anyway.”
He’s entitled to his opinion, but we’re entitled to the minutes. And at press time, we still don’t have them.
We have, however, filed a formal Open Records request with the school, and we expect that they will be made available very soon.
The silly thing about the whole fiasco is that we don’t really expect to learn much from the minutes. All we wanted to know was the wording of the motion and the recorded vote of those in favor and against.
What we did learn came from the behavior of the board itself where there seems to be a pretty strong split between the trustees themselves and a lot of animosity from at least one board member toward the superintendent.
And of course there was also several very unhappy residents who voiced their support for their coach and their concern about the state of the board.
For a town like Hedley, the school is the community in a very real sense, and the trustees need to take heed that they are not there to serve just their own interests but the long-term interest of Hedley’s very identity.
Interesting times indeed.
This is exactly why I want to become a member of the school board of trustees. These children, at least the ones I’ve talked to, absolutely adore Mr. Wallace and the great work he’s done for the school. He is a good man and deserves to stay, at least in my opinion. As for the minutes, they should have complied, no questions asked. We all deserve, and have the right, to know what’s going on and the reasonings behind such actions. I have three children within the Hedley school system, there are many good teachers and coaches there. There is a lot of love within our school system. I feel that the children deserve a voice. It is, after all, their school
It is just so very sad to me to see the wonderful town I grew up in turn in to this. People used to love each other, watch out for each other, now it’s just about protecting the small little empire you’ve cut out for yourself, no matter what you have to do to everyone else to keep it. It’s sickening. Where is the respect for others, common courtesy, and sense of fairness? For four of those members, it’s about self, not about community. Folks in Hedley, you are the elective voice, use your voice in May! Do you really think these four board members best represent what Hedley stands for? I hope and pray it isn’t.