Steller: TUSD's awkward communications night

At Tuesday night’s meeting, TUSD’s five school board members were supposed to go to five separate tables to talk about improving communications.

Except two members refused to join in the discussions.

And one had to call in on a cellphone because she was out of town.

And the people in the audience were allowed to mingle and listen to the conversations, but they could only attend one of the five discussions at a time, of course, only having one body per person.

The effort was perhaps a sign of the way things are going lately on the Tucson Unified board. Even an apparent effort at improved communication on the board ended up instead in complications, reinforcing the divide between the three allies who make up the board majority and the two who are its chief dissidents.

It also raised the suspicions of this journalist, in that one of the five tables was dedicated to discussions of how to communicate better with the news media. The only guideline I’d like to see on that topic is: Return my calls.

Board President Adelita Grijalva told me Thursday that the breakout sessions were intended to help TUSD’s staff draft a code of ethics or conduct for board members. It’s an idea that emerged in part from the National School Boards Association meeting in Nashville in March.

(More division there: Grijalva and her two allies on the board, Kristel Foster and Cam Juarez, attended, while Mark Stegeman and Michael Hicks did not.)

“There isn’t a way for us as a governing body to make sure that we’re all playing by the same rulebook,” she said.

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Tuesday night, there were tables dedicated to communications between the board and the superintendent, the district’s other top leaders, school principals, the news media, and each other. But Grijalva couldn’t be there, because she was in Phoenix where her sister-in-law had just given birth to her nephew, making her an aunt for the first time.

Stegeman and Hicks refused to participate. They may have perceived — correctly — that the workshop, as it was called, was intended in part to corral them. One of the key questions was whether there should be any protocols for board members visiting schools so administrators don’t feel obligated to drop everything when a board member drops by. Stegeman has been criticized for meddling with individual schools’ affairs in the past, and Hicks has more recently.

But Stegeman just hates the whole format. For the board to break into smaller groups to have discussions that the public can’t necessarily hear violates the spirit of Arizona’s open-meetings law, he told me. He said he’s objected to these breakout sessions before, and the board changed the format by allowing the public to listen in at each table and by recording and posting on the Internet the content of every conversation.

“If we’re going to collaborate, why don’t we sit together and collaborate?” Stegeman said. “Here they set it up so we’re deliberately not talking to each other.”

The idea was that each board member would spend 10 minutes at each table, rotating through, the questioners posing the same queries to each board member. Stegeman also would have preferred to know the questions in advance to be able to think over his answers, he said. He and Hicks plan to provide written responses to the questions posed Tuesday.

There were some interesting ones. Stefanie Boe, the district’s spokeswoman, asked whether board members feel it’s appropriate to discuss their votes or other information from board meetings with each other on social-media sites like Facebook. You could argue that if three or four board members start discussing school matters online — even if they just hit that “like” button on a comment — they could be breaking the open-meetings law.

But some of the questions asked of the board members have a slightly sinister feel — the feeling of an effort to assert central control over the board. Boe’s second question to board members, for example, was, “In your view, who at the district should you alert when contacted by the media?”

The correct answer, in my view, is “nobody.” That is, an elected board member should feel free to say whatever he or she wants to a reporter without telling anybody. They are accountable to the voters, after all, not to the administration.

But look, if they want to establish some guidelines that will help minimize conflict and keep themselves on task, they should feel free. It would be wise, though, to ensure that all five board members have communicated their thoughts on these matters of board communication.