Gagnon Challenging new Board Members?

In the Lowell Sun Political column this week, School Committee members Matt Sheehan and MIke Miles point out their reasoning once again on bringing to the town meeting an article limiting the hiring of former school committee members by the school district:

Sheehan and Miles realized that they had the choice to either bring the issue back up for reconsideration at the School Committee.. where it would probably have been killed by the other three, or to bring it to the people directly and let them make the choice.

“I’ve been hearing from people all over town who wanted to see the original motion pass and were disappointed that we changed it,” said

Sheehan, who voted for the amended version after his original proposal got shot down. “I just figured we should let the people decide.”

Miles added his name to the warrant article for the same reason, he said.

“It should be up to the people,” he said. “I think it’s a necessary policy. If we say you can’t get a job until you’ve been out of office for five years, you won’t have people wondering if you got the job because of nepotism or favoritism. There’s too much of that going on.”

Now, Committee member Nancy Gagnon seems to be the most vocal against this effort (then again, maybe she was the only one who could be reached for comment). It should have been no surprise that Sheehan and Miles would push this through.. as Sheehan ran for office with this as one of his key issues and Miles was supporting him:

Committee member Nancy Gagnon said the measure clearly targets former board members like May Paquette, whose name has popped up as possibility for business manager, or D.J. Deeb, who has the qualifications to become a principal.

“It’s really not fair to be singling out these people,” Gagnon said. “Why not say all former board members can’t be hired by the School Department? There are so many other pressing issues out there. It would be nice to see (Sheehan and MIles) put this kind of effort into something like a feasibility study for a new high school.”

Now, I don’t understand the second paragraph there where she says “why not say all former board members can’t be hired by the school department?” That’s pretty much exactly what the proposal does say, except that it gives a 5 year wait instead of unlimited.

A pressing issue I do agree with is transparency in government.. and this proposal is one good step in that direction. No one is saying that previous members of the school board should never work in the schools, just that they have to wait for a period of time.

The proposal says that there should be a waiting period so as to lessen the impact of people in positions of power taking a position while they still have close relationships with other current members as well as their being hired by someone they had earlier been responsible for hiring.

This would also protect elected school officials from those who would challenge their intent in running for office. There could be no claim that their reason for running was to set up a position for themselves. It would also protect them from being easily able to change the policy arbitrarily (as they could now). When the people of the town have voted on it, its a much bigger issue to change it.. although Tom Finneran succeeded in showing how state level politicians can have contempt for the voters.

Are there other pressing issues? Yeah.. I think so. Its seems to me that Superintendent Mullin so far is doing pretty well getting things organized the way he wants.

I don’t really see this feasibility study thing going very far. The people in this town are not going to vote a proposition 2-1/2 override to build a new school at this time, so they question whether to put money forward for a study that will just be put on a shelf.