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John’s Notes on the 08/15/2024 BOE Meeting

Hypothetical Lawsuits, Prism and Cell Phone Searches

“If you don’t fund the ethics complaint against Sai, the District is going to get sued.”

How often has the phrase “the town/district will get sued” been improperly used as an excuse to advance harmful decisions or take down articles exposing government incompetence?

Sai could have easily sued the District for each of the meritless complaints – the vast majority of it dismissed and the remainder highly suspect-made against her publicly by the Board. She didn’t – likely, she was more interested in improving the District than creating a bigger mess than the old Board had started.

The complaint against Sai is from two years ago, and unless the BOE made a foolish and unethical agreement with a former Administrator to pursue an ethics complaint over what would amount to absolutely nothing in a lawsuit, then most likely, the statute of limitations has already passed.

When Natasha destroyed the “you’re just voting this away because you’re friends” argument last night, the new narrative became “omg the District is going to get sued”.

By whom? On what basis?

These claims always lack details because they are barely defensible.

If there were a lawsuit based on the ethics complaint filed by Ms. Stanley et al., it would likely be thrown out in a second.  Not only because they would not meet any standard connected to damages but the individual(s) involved obtained employment afterwards—the cost of defending it would likely be far less than what this circus has turned into.

The conflict of interest argument was interesting, as the former BOE Majority voted to have the District pay an attorney to work for them.  Because this was fundamentally disallowed, those same BOE members—facing multiple validated complaints due to their actions against Sai—then voted to have the District pay for their defense.

This was after the “this ethics complaint is about Sai’s political connections” argument- of which she has none and is nowhere on the ethics complaint.

Ms. Stanley, Mr. Hyman, and all the former BOE Members who voted for this monstrosity are free to pursue the case using their resources instead of those intended for our students.

Here are my comments from last night (I also talk about Prism and the cell phone search policy):

 

 

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