By Arun K. Ramanathan, Photo: Theresa Harrington/EdSource, EdSource, March 7, 2022
Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve attended and watched a lot of school board meetings. I know that this is not normal behavior. Once, during a getaway to a fancy resort in Ojai, my wife returned from the spa to find me lying on the bed raptly watching the Ojai Unified School Board meeting.
“You have a sickness,” she said, and I didn’t argue with her.
People think school board meetings are dull affairs knee-deep in educational jargon. Much of the time, that is true. But every now and then, they transform into the theater of the absurd. I once watched each member of a five-person board repeatedly vote for themselves for board president before realizing they were being mocked on social media. More commonly, during budget cutting and contract negotiating times, they are the bureaucratic equivalent of a shark attack — hours of boring presentations punctuated by a sudden upheaval of public rage that rips district leaders apart.
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