Editor,

The South Whidbey School Board continued to display its dysfunction at a Wednesday meeting last month.

First, the board reaffirmed a policy that discourages individual board members from speaking with the media. Then, disgruntled with a court’s ruling that the district violated the state Open Public Records Act, the board allowed its former member Fred O’Neal to malign the plaintiff and to misrepresent that Superintendent Jo Moccia spent her time responding to public records requests. In fact, she admits in deposition testimony that she wholly delegated the search for records to staff and the review of records to highly paid Seattle attorneys. “It was all by counsel,” she said.

Finally, the District could have electronically sent the few relevant minutes of the three-hour meeting to its attorney, via an edited audiotape. Instead it likely paid her transportation expenses and hundreds of dollars per hour to sit and listen to, among other things, Fred O’Neal’s sneering recitation of excerpts from the court’s ruling, a document with which she is already familiar. By contrast, the English teacher in attendance with her students, who has doubtless spent thousands of unpaid hours outside of contract helping them to learn, will be told that the district’s supposed “lack of resources” prevents it from paying her what she deserves.

ERIC HOOD

Langley