Nepotism Policy Changes Needed at Fox C-6!

I saw a poster today that reminded me of the nepotism problems we are having at Fox with the hiring and promoting of relatives of our school board members. The caption on the poster from www.despair.com/nepotism.html says it all. Perhaps the poster should be hung in the Service Center. The hiring of school board director Linda Nash's daughter-in-law to to the position of Food Nutrition Service Director without having the credentials that the district was looking for in their job posting woke up our community. For our superintendent and assistant superintendent to defend the hiring of Linda Nash's daughter-in-law demonstrates their lack of respect for the community. It is also the reason that we have two new school board members.

Our administrators and their few but vocal supporters believed that Pete Nicholas and Ruth Ann Newman would be re-elected based upon the misinformation they supply to the public about how great the district is doing and what a great job our school board has been doing. First, I want to say that our district does have a lot of great teachers and some great principals. However, the nepotism and egregious hiring and promoting of non-qualified central office administrator's family members and spouses has destroyed the morale of district employees. It also makes it impossible to have any respect for our administrators and school board members.

Board members and administrators keep informing the public that Fox is in the Top 10 in our state. Can someone from our school district tell us what Top 10 that is? Missouri DESE has so many Top 10 lists that nearly every school in the state can claim to be in the Top 10 for something.

Fox hasn't been awarded a Gold Star School or National Blue Ribbon School award in more than 10 years. The only school to win the award in the district was Lone Dell Elementary. Rockwood has received the same award more than 30 times in the last 10 years. Northwest has received the award 6 times or more. Drive around the district and look at the award walls to see how long it has been since there was a posting of an academic award. Most of the awards I have seen occurred prior to 2005.

Fox's school board is responsible for nearly doubling the salary of our superintendent over the last 7 years despite the economic downturn. Our school administrators and school board members may believe that our superintendent should be making almost $250,000 per year. However, if the community was in charge of our superintendent's raises, I don't believe they would have made the same increases that our school board has given her. It simply proves that our school board has not been representing our community very well and is out of touch with our community.

We have two new school board members. I hope they can bring about a positive change to our school district. However, at the moment, our school board does not appear to be reading emails from their new accounts. I thought they were elected to serve and represent our community. If they don't read their emails, it will be difficult for them to represent our community. I suggest that you contact your board members and ask them why they aren't reading or responding to emails. Let me know if you get a response. I haven't emailed our two new school board members using their school email addresses but have used their personal email addresses without receiving a response.

I recommend reading the 2007 St. Louis Post Dispatch Suburban Journals article when Fox C-6 district officials told the newspaper that the community's concerns about nepotism were unfounded. In June 2006, David Palmer was the Fox C-6 School Board President. While he was board president, his wife Gee Palmer was promoted to the district head nurse position. It was voted on and approved by the school board. She also received a 75% pay increase. Her salary was increased from roughly $40,000 to nearly $70,000. It seems highly improbable that she was the most qualified person for the job given the fact that there were 10 nurses with more work experience in the district. Several of those nurses had more than twice the number of years of experience in the district and a few had nearly 3 times as many years of experience working for the district. Her promotion and the hiring of David's kids while he was on the school board most likely kept him from getting re-elected in 2008.

It was strange that Mr. Palmer couldn't be reached for comment for the article in 2007. If the article had mentioned the promotion of Mr. Palmer's wife, the public would have been better informed as to how school district officials were better at representing their families than the community. Fox's school district policy has specific rules regarding the hiring or promotion of a school board member's spouse. I'm sure they followed the rule or at least we were told that they did. But, it certainly didn't reflect well on our school board and that must be why people were complaining on Town Talk. Here we are in 2013 and history is repeating itself with the recent hiring of Linda Nash's daughter-in-law to a position paying $65,000 and she only has a high school diploma. She also has enthusiasm. The hiring of Linda Nash's daughter-in-law really stood out due to her lack of credentials. It is time for some of our Fox school board members to step down and for the family members to resign as well. The 2007 article can be found on STLTODAY.COM. It was written by Kevin Carbery who now writes for the Arnold-Imperial Leader.

2007 - FOX SCHOOLS: Nepotism Complaints Unfounded, District Officials Say

http://www.despair.com/nepotism.html

There was another poster that reminded me of our school district as well. Mostly because of the photo rather than the caption. Because in this case, our district went the other way and took a person who was working in fast food and hired her as a Director of Food Service. Of course, it's not the same as being an astronaut. But, you get the point. At least the district was willing to give her 2 years to get her degree or credentials which has already been shown to require 4 years to achieve. Maybe they will give her an extension in 2 years to keep working on those credentials. In the meantime, everyone working for her will continue to do their job as they always have with the same enthusiasm as they had before.

http://www.despair.com/potential.html

Review - April 16, 2013 Fox C-6 School Board Meeting

I was unable to attend the April 16 Fox C-6 school board meeting. However, since the meeting I have spoken with several individuals who did attend the meeting and learned about some of the key items that stood out at the meeting.

Stand Out Items from the April 16, 2013 Fox C-6 School Board Meeting:

• New board member Steve Holloway voted "NO" on the group consenting for Agenda Item 6.0 Consent Grouping for Action - Human Resources.
• New board member Dan Kroupa asked a question about "Contract Modifications" that was in Agenda Item 6.0 Consent Grouping For Action - Human Resources.
• New board member Dan Kroupa asked our Superintendent Dianne Critchlow to look at what other school districts have in their nepotism policies and bring those to the board for discussion for the Board Policy and Regulations Review meeting in May.
• Board member John Laughlin asked questions about the Athletic Field Usage Fees.

I haven't spoken with any of the above board members yet or emailed them questions regarding the items above. I would like to note that I sent all of our current school board members an email a couple of weeks ago and have not had a single response from any of them. The emails that I sent to Dan Kroupa and Steve Holloway were using their personal email addresses. I will email them using their new school email addresses and let you know if I get a response from their new Fox C-6 school board email addresses. I wrote about the fact that I received automatic messages from several board members that my messages were DELETED but NOT READ on Monday April 15, 2013.

You can read about the emails being deleted in this post:
Fox C-6 Board Members Delete Emails Without Reading Them

Since my April 15, 2013 article regarding the deleting of email messages, I've received more email messages stating that my follow up email message was deleted as well without being read. Not reading email messages from citizens in the community appears to violate school board policy. Perhaps our board members don't communicate with me due to the fact that superintendent Dianne Critchlow stated in a 2011 email to the board that that they could not speak with me about issues and that they should direct all communications to herself or the school district attorney. It seems that she does not want our board members to be apprised of my concerns since I am willing to voice those concerns.

I would think that our school board members would be a little more mindful now of the fact that the community is watching them more closely now. They should know that not responding to questions concerning how they are doing business does not reflect well on them or our school district. I will continue to keep the community informed as attempt to educate and communicate concerns to our school board. Only having 3 minutes for Public Comment and being allowed to use names doesn't really give much time or ability to communicate concerns to our school board. That is why it is important that our board members open and read their emails. Also, the fact that our school board meetings are not audio or video recorded allows the school district to censor concerns from the Public that are brought up during Public Comments. School board meeting minutes fail to mention what is contained in those comments. This practice keeps the Public from being fully informed as to what is going on in our school district. This is not transparency in any sense of the word.

I would like to clear up some confusion as to how Consent Grouping For Action - Human Resources voting is done after reading some comments that were posted on Topix recently after the April 2013 school board meeting. The board members receive the Board Meeting Packets each month prior to the school board meeting. Our school board members are expected to review the information contained in the Board Meeting Packet prior to the next school board meeting so they can make informed decisions and ask questions if necessary and discuss agenda items prior to their votes . (NOTE: You can now download the Board Meeting Packets from the Fox C-6 District Website prior to school board meetings.) In fact, I received an email on Tuesday April 16, 2013 from our school board secretary that the January through April 2013 school board meeting packets are now online and they include the Bill Payments as well as a PDF document.

The Board Meeting Packets can be download from here:
Fox C-6 Board Meeting Packets

After downloading the Board Meeting Packets, you can use the Table of Contents in the PDF document to jump immediately to Agenda Item 6.0 in the document and read what Steve Holloway and the other board members got to review prior to their Consent Grouping For Action vote. There is no prior discussion among the board members regarding the new hires, contract modifications or dismissals that is contained in this section prior to the vote unless they discuss it during the board meeting. Our administrators simply provide the board members a list of names of the new hires and dismissals in the board meeting packet and the school board members are asked to "approve" that list. So, I'm not sure if Steve Holloway was voting NO due to a name on the list or that he voted NO because of the process. I hope to find out from him before the next school board meeting.

As you can see that this is quite a flawed system in the fact that our superintendent(s) make the suggestions as to who should be hired or dismissed or are simply quitting. The board is asked to accept the list "as is". Given the recent track record for hiring family members of board members in our district, this type of practice doesn't look good to the community and has brought a lot of attention to our school district in the media. This isn't the first time egregious example of nepotism by our school board. In 2006, the Fox C-6 School Board voted to promote current school board member David Palmer's wife Gee Palmer to the position of District Head Nurse. Gee Palmer's promotion occurred while David Palmer was the President of the School Board in 2006. I documented this back in 2010 after I learned about it from individuals in our school district. I verified the promotion from the school board meeting minutes which are no longer available on the district website. I have a copy of those minutes.

What made the promotion of Gee Palmer even worse was the fact that she received a 75% pay increase over her previous salary as a regular school district nurse. The position was changed from a 9 month contract to an 11 or 12 month contract. So, Gee Palmer's pay was increased from roughly $40,000 to $70,000 for those additional 2 to 3 months of work. Additionally, when I looked into this, I found that there were 10 nurses that had more years of experience working in the school district than Gee Palmer. One of the nurses that had applied for the position had nearly 3 times the number of years of service in the school district. Now, one can argue (or should I say our administrators and school board members would argue) that Gee Palmer was "the best for the job". However, in speaking with many others who worked or have worked for the district including retired administrators, many of them told me that Gee Palmer was not "the best" for the job when she was hired. Do you think Gee Palmer was chosen due to her being the wife of then School Board President David Palmer? At the April 2013 Fox C-6 school board meeting, David Palmer was elected as the Fox C-6 School Board Vice President. All of this occurred before I began dealing with any issues within our school district and was under the assumption that things were being done "above board". So like most of the public, I was not aware of what had been going in within our school district.

2007 Fox C-6 Nepotism News Story in the Post Dispatch
In 2007, there was a St. Louis Post Dispatch news article concerning nepotism issues in the Fox C-6 School District. The article stated that District Officials said that Nepotism Complaints were Unfounded. In reading the news article, I found it very odd that "Attempts to reach board member David Palmer were unsuccessful." Could it have been that he did not want to discuss the issue given the fact that his wife had recently been promoted to the district head nursing position and given a 75% pay increase. Perhaps he didn't want to discuss the fact that two of his children had been hired as Teacher's Aides by the school district according to Missouri DESE records.

You can find the St. Louis Post Dispatch article here:

FOX SCHOOLS: Nepotism Complaints Unfounded, District Officials Say

Please contact your school board members concerning making changes to our school board policies regarding nepotism in our school district. I have written about the Lindbergh and Mehlville school board policies regarding nepotism. I have also read many other school district policies as well. Many of the basic policies state that decisions made by the board SHOULD NOT give the appearance of wrong doing. I believe that our school board has made several decisions that give the appearance of wrong doing and that is why the community is looking for change.

One Small Step for Fox C-6! One Giant Leap for Our Community!

Yesterday April 15, 2013, I received an email from our school board secretary informing me that the "April bills have been posted on the website."

You can download the bill payments contained in the board meeting packet from here:
Fox C-6 Board Meeting Packets

This is a huge step towards improving transparency in our school district. It has taken nearly two years to get to this point. Now the previous months and years of board meeting packets with bill payments need to get posted on the district website so the community can assess how our school district has been handling our taxpayer dollars.

It's all about accountability, integrity and respect. It's about the values that our central office administrators like to throw onto their letterhead. The letterhead page for the bill payments has the following words in very large print as a watermarks at the top of the page:
Responsibility, Service, Learning, Honesty, Integrity and Respect.

The words on the letterhead are pretty meaningless if they are not practiced. In fact, they are quite insulting given the fact that I have received a lot of grief and excuses for trying to get our school district to do the right thing and post the board meeting packets and bill payments onto the district website. Sending out cease and desist letters for asking them to do their job does not seem as if they are practicing what they are preaching. Actions speak much louder than words!

I will continue to work towards making positive changes as to how our school district conducts business and treats both the community and its employees.

Great Leadership demands Honesty, Integrity and Ethical behavior. Anything less is unacceptable! Without those traits, a Leader will never gain or deserve the Respect and Trust of the Community or their Employees.

Thank you to our school board and district administrators for posting the Board Meeting Packets and Bill Payments on the district website!

Fox C-6 Board Members Delete Emails Without Reading Them!

I received a couple of Read Receipt messages on Sunday evening from Board Vice President Dan Smith and Director Cheryl Hermann informing me that they deleted my email message regarding the Board Meeting Packets without even reading the email. Their decision to NOT READ my message could be seen as a violation of school board policy. Dan Smith is set to become the Fox C-6 School Board President at the April 2013 board meeting. Perhaps he doesn't take his job seriously. Perhaps he doesn't feel the need to answer questions from the community as to why the school board did not discuss the posting of Board Meeting Packets on the district website during open session. Perhaps he doesn't believe that decisions made by the school board need to be documented in board meeting minutes. I can't speak for Mr. Smith, but deleting email messages without reading them speaks loudly to the community to which he was elected to serve.

Board Members Should Read School District Policies

I would like to recommend that our school board members take some time to read our school board policies. I've made this recommendation many times over the last several years. I haven't seen much evidence that shows that they understand what their roles and responsibilities are to the patrons of the Fox C-6 School District. They took an oath to uphold the duties and responsibilities as outlined in our school board policies. Our superintendent Dianne Critchlow tells me in emails that our school board members are caring and competent. However, the actions of our school board members speak much louder than words!

The citizens of our community elected these people to serve as our voice in the school district. When they are asked simple questions that they don't want to answer, they simply ignore the questions. Or, in this case delete those questions. That type of a response DOES NOT show the community that they are "caring and competent" board members.

Here are the email messages that I received from Dan Smith and Cheryl Hermann:

From: Smith, Dan - Board Vice President
Subject: Not read: Fox C-6 Board Meeting Information Packets on District Website
Message: Your message was deleted without being read on Sunday, April 14, 2013 9:07:19 PM (GMT-06:00) Central Time (US & Canada).

From: Hermann, Cheryl - Director
Subject: Not read: Fox C-6 Board Meeting Information Packets on District Website
Message: Your message was deleted without being read on Sunday, April 14, 2013 9:08:22 PM (GMT-06:00) Central Time (US & Canada).

Board Members Not Answering Emails

I know of several others that have sent email messages to our school board members and haven't received a response from them. What is the point of having individual email addresses if your board members aren't willing to read your email and respond? Several people have commented on the Topix website about how they have contacted our board members and spoken to them and said how helpful they were. Perhaps the people posting those messages are board members and school administrators trying to fool the public! Or, perhaps those people were telling the board members what a great job they are doing. Our board members appear to respond to those types of comments.

Former board member Ruth Ann Newman recently stated in her letter to the editor in the Arnold-Imperial Leader newspaper that she "liked to think about the positive aspects of problems and concerns. Too many times, the focus is on the negative." Asking school board members to answer questions as to why they don't want to post public records or why they didn't record their decisions in the board meeting minutes IS NOT BEING NEGATIVE!! That is simply asking your school board members to do their job. Our district has been plagued for a number of years by a school board that has not been doing its job. I have been amazed by the number of people that have come up and told me how happy they are that our recent school board election ousted the two incumbents, Pete Nicholas and Ruth Ann Newman. My father even told me the day after the election that everyone he spoke to was happy with the school board election results including himself. I think that speaks for itself.

Were Messages Deleted By Board Members or Someone Else?

I found it odd that both board members deleted my message within 1 minute and 3 seconds of each other. Perhaps it wasn't the board members themselves that deleted my messages. Maybe they were deleted by our superintendent or the school board secretary. Or, perhaps my messages were automatically deleted by their computer system because the board members never downloaded my original email message that I sent nearly 4 weeks ago that they never responded to. Who knows? Are our board members getting their email messages?  Since they don't respond, it's hard to tell. The old schoolboard@fox.k12.mo.us email address went directly to our school board secretary and not to the school board. Perhaps this is just another way of keeping our school board members from being burdened with having to answer questions from the public.

Actions definitely speak louder than words!!

Fox C-6 April 2013 Board Meeting Packet and Agenda Posted On District Website

The district posted the April 2013 Board Meeting Packet and Agenda on the district website on Friday April 12, 2013. Please download and review what our school board will be discussing and voting on at the April 16, 2013 school board meeting.

You can find the Board Meeting Packets here on the Fox C-6 Website:

Fox C-6 Board of Education Board Meeting Packets

Here are a some of the more notable Agenda Items for the April 16, 2013 Fox C-6 School Board Meeting:

• 1.2 -  NEW SCHOOL BOARD MEMBERS - Administer Oath of Office for newly elected board members Steve Holloway and Dan Kroupa. 
• 3.1 -  DROPOUT RATE UPDATE - The Dropout Data Analysis/Comparison shows that the district is having a higher dropout rate than last year which is almost double to what it was in 2010/2011 (1.23%). For the 2012/2013 school year to date, the Fox High School dropout rate is 2.94% and the Seckman High School dropout rate is 1.04%. The District dropout rate is 1.99%.
• 3.3 -  JEFFCO INTERSECTION IMPROVEMENTS - The City of Arnold is asking the school district to share in the cost of an engineering study for improvements to make the Jeffco intersection safer for pedestrian traffic. MODOT currently has budgeted money to do improvements along Jeffco in FY15 and this study is essential if it is to be part of the improvements. The city is asking us to pay for half of the study which will cost about $80,000.
• 3.4 -  ADDITIONAL OFFICE SPACE FOR FOX SERVICE CENTER - In order to free up needed classroom space at Seckman High School (SHS), we will be making a series of moves which requires 4 office spaces to be built at the Service Center in the area just outside the main lobby. District Diagnostics will be moving out of SHS and into the area currently occupied by Food Service and CKC. Food Service, CKC, Nursing Director and Safety/Security Director will move to the Service Center. ICS (contractor for A/C and D/E zones) will be performing the framing and finishing of this area.
• 4.5 -  BID APPROVALS - Bond Funds will be used to purchase 4 new vehicles for the district fleet and lighting will be replaced using loan funds from the Department of Natural Resources. 
• 4.7 -  NEW FOX HIGH SCOREBOARD - Recommendation is made by the administrators that the Board of Education approve the scoreboard as presented for the Fox High football field. The cost of the new scoreboard is only $287,000. From the board packet notes, it is difficult to tell if the district will pay for the sign and receive the commission on the advertisements or if the district won't have to pay for the sign at all and Daktronics receives the first 5 years of advertising fees at a 10% higher advertising rate (meaning no out of pocket cost to the district).
• 5.1 -  CONSENT GROUPING FOR ACTION - BUSINESS - PAYMENT OF BILLS - Since our school board did not post the Bill Payments on the district website again this month, the only way to obtain a copy of what the board is approving at this time is to submit a Missouri Sunshine Law request for the bill payment listing. The district has 3 business days to respond to your Sunshine Law Request and can charge you a fee to obtain that information. It should be noted that in the past, I have been provided with the bill payments with each board meeting packet I requested under a Missouri Sunshine Law Request.

PUBLIC NOT GETTING SAME INFORMATION AS BOARD MEMBERS

Please note that the Public is NOT being provided the same information that our school board members are receiving in their board meeting packets. The school board members are getting the Bill Payments listing that they must approve at each board meeting. I have asked for the Bill Payments to be posted to the district website. Bill payments are posted on many other district websites for the public to review. That is your only way you have to review for yourself whether or not your district is being fiscally responsible. Dan Smith our current board vice president told me at the December 2012 board meeting that not everyone is going to agree on how the district spends it's money. However, you won't know how they are spending your money unless they provide you with that information.

The most recent reason as to why the district is not posting the payments is the one I received from Ruth Ann Newman in an email on Monday March 18, 2013. Mrs. Newman wrote that, "Right now, we felt like this was a privacy issue--not for the employees, but for the students. Someone is checking to see what other districts are doing and why, or why not." When I asked our school board to post this information at the August 2011 school board meeting, superintendent Dianne Brown (now Critchlow) told me that the district didn't have a full time person to maintain our website like other school districts do. She said that Fox chooses to put its money into the classroom instead. You almost get the feeling that the district is trying to hide things. Why is the district so unwilling to publish this information? If you really want the information, the district is going to make you pay for that information by submitting a Missouri Sunshine Law Request. Does that seem like the right thing to do for a school district that likes to flaunt their Character Education traits everywhere such as: Responsibility, Honesty, Integrity and Respect?

On Tuesday March 19, 2013, I wrote back to the entire school board asking the board several questions as to why they didn't document in the minutes that they were starting to post the board packets on the district website and asking why they thought the student's privacy was a concern for bill payments among others. I have not received a single response from the board in over 3 weeks. On this past Thursday April 11, 2013,  I sent a follow up email request and still haven't received a response after two more days. My most recent email was also sent to our new board members Steve Holloway and Dan Kroupa.

TRANSPARENCY REQUIRED!

EMAIL OR CALL YOUR BOARD MEMBERS AND ASK FOR THE BILL PAYMENTS

Take a moment to email or call your elected school board members and request that our school district post the Bill Payments on the district website. Who knows, you might be able to find out whether or not those "Cease and Desist" letters cost the taxpayers any money. Our superintendent's response to the Post Dispatch was very misleading as to how much those Cease and Desist letters cost the district. She made it sound as if they didn't cost the district anything. Well, actually anything more than the normal hourly rate the school district pays it's attorneys.

I know from the bill payments I have obtained so far, the district spent more than $100,000 in legal fees for the months of August and September 2012 combined. My Cease and Desist letter was sent out on August 24, 2012, so I'm sure it was a part of those legal expenses. The district paid out another $10,000 in the month of December 2012. I don't have any bill payment listings past December 2012 so I don't know if there were any legal fees for the most recent cease and desist letters. But, it certainly seems like an awful lot of legal costs for a district that is doing everything "above board" as Todd Scott pointed out to me in the past. Mr. Scott told me that while I was asking Dan Baker as to whether or not he had informed the school board about the USDA's Final Agency Decision that found the school district and the state Missouri Non-Compliant with federal laws in the National School Lunch Program. The state of Missouri was found to be Non-Compliant because they are responsible for ensuring that our school district follows the USDA Guidelines and Regulations.

BOARD MEMBERS ABSTAIN FROM VOTES ON BILL PAYMENTS

So, do you think our school board and central office administrators want you to have the bill payments? It would allow you to review the payments and find out why Linda Nash, Pete Nicholas and Ruth Ann Newman all had to abstain from voting on approving the Bill Payments at the March 2013 school board meeting. Aren't you curious?

TWO NEW School Board Members - Thank You For Your Support!

Thank You to everyone in our community who exercised the right and took the time to vote in the April 2, 2013 election for our Fox C-6 School Board! Your Vote has changed the face of the Fox C-6 School Board more than it has in over a decade.

Congratulations to Dan Kroupa and Steve Holloway for winning seats on the Fox C-6 School Board!

The election results clearly show that the community was awakened by the extremely poor decisions made by our school board and central office administrators over the past several months. Hopefully the central office administrators that have been trying to silence the community and the teachers of our district change their ways or will be relieved of their duties. 

I had the opportunity to spend a few hours at the Arnold Recreation Center polling location before and after work during the election and was able to speak with many supporters of the candidates. I met and spoke with several teachers in our district who were there supporting Steve Holloway and Dan Kroupa. The teachers definitely helped get our two NEW school board members elected.

Please support Dan and Steve and their efforts to improve our school district over the next 3 years. They have the opportunity to do a lot of great things for the community and our school district with your help in their newly elected positions. It will be up to our current board members to work with them and respect their input and ideas.

While speaking with people at the Rec Center and asking for their support, I introduced myself to a man holding a Pete Nicholas sign. He introduced himself as Dennis Nash. He told me that he was Linda Nash's husband and that my father was his principal when he was in high school. I told him that I hoped he didn't have to visit my father's office too often. He said he did a good job at staying away from his office when he was in school. I then told him that it was OK for our school board and I to have differences of opinion. I said all that I have been doing is asking for them to do their job and conduct business as openly as other school districts do and that I was hoping for change in the future. It was a good conversation and hopefully he will convey this to Linda.

I got the chance to speak with Dave Palmer. Dave and I talked mostly about running and other things from our days in school.

I also had the chance to speak with Dan Kroupa. Dan certainly has the credentials to be a great school board member and his background in accounting should bring more accountability to our board. Dan now has a better understanding of how our district has been conducting business and I look forward to working with him and Steve Holloway and the rest of our school board as we start turning things around in our school district.

I would also like to thank everyone who supported Mark Jones for his bid for a seat on the Fox C-6 School Board. Mark did incredibly well for having only 100 yard signs and no print ads in any of the local papers. I learned quite a bit from helping Mark. He put together a lot of great campaign information from county records. I suspect that if Mark runs for the school board again that he has a great chance of winning a seat on the board and would make a great school board member.

Now lets start moving our school district in a positive direction and truly involve the community in educating our children. This is your school district.

You have shown that Your Vote can make a difference!

The Unofficial Election Results reported by the Jefferson County on April 3, 2013 is as follows:

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FOX C-6 SCHOOL DISTRICT

Total Votes            9355

Times Over Voted          1

Number Of Under Votes  1169

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RUTH ANN NEWMAN        1564   16.72%

PETE NICHOLAS          1209   12.92%

MARK S. JONES          1108   11.84%

ANTHONY W. THEBEAU      435    4.65%

STEVE P. HOLLOWAY      2236   23.90%

DAN KROUPA             2776   29.67%

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Please Vote April 2nd and Make A Positive Change In Our District

You have a great opportunity on Tuesday April 2, 2013 to make a POSITIVE change in the Fox C-6 School District by casting your vote and ELECTING TWO NEW SCHOOL BOARD MEMBERS to the Fox C-6 School Board.

Please VOTE for
 MARK JONES and STEVE HOLLOWAY!!

Your Vote WILL Make a Difference!!

I have spoken with all of the candidates that have been at public meetings and I am putting my support behind Mark Jones and Steve Holloway. They are both graduates of Fox Senior High School. They both have successful careers and are very dedicated individuals. Mark Jones graduated in 1985. Steve Holloway graduated in 1990. They both have children attending our school district and want to see our school district improve its reputation and how it involves and respects our community.  They will be working to increase Transparency and Accountability in our school district which is something that our district has been severely lacking.

Mark Jones doesn't have any family members working for the school district. Steve Holloway's wife is a teacher at Antonia Elementary. I have met and spoken with her in person and I was very impressed by her. I have heard a lot of great things about her as a teacher and I just learned today that a retired Fox elementary school teacher I know had her in his class when he was teaching.

Our district has been like a family for years. However, that family oriented emphasis has been taken too  far recently and it has brought unwelcome attention to our school district. Our current board members that are up for re-election stand behind their recent hiring decisions. These same incumbent board members voted in 2006 to promote another board president's wife to the position of district head nurse despite the fact that there were at least 9 or 10 nurses with more years of experience than her in the district at that time. One of those other nurses had nearly 3 times the number of years of experience in the district. The board also voted to increase her salary by 75% by changing her contract from 9 months to an 11 or 12 month contract. The recent hiring of a board president's relative is not new. But, the most recent decision really stood out due to the fact that board president Linda Nash's daughter-in-law did not have the college degree or certification that the district was looking for in their job post. Those in the community that have seen the recent media attention our school district received have been telling me that they want to see a change in our school board as well. In order to make that change, I am asking that you vote for Mark Jones and Steve Holloway. 

Questions For The Community

ANY VOTE for an incumbent school board member this year would show that you are willing to continue to put up with a school board that is unresponsive and shows very little respect for the community they were elected to serve. Our school board members are elected to be our voice in the school district.

Let me ask you some questions to see if you believe that our school board has been representing us as you elected them to do:

• Would you have asked our school board members to approve spending more than $3 million dollars to install artificial turf to upgrade our athletic fields to multi-purpose fields if they had asked you?
  
  (NOTE: Pete Nicholas stated on his campaign Facebook page that, "I presented the idea of upgrading our fields from grass to turf, to our School Board of Education. After weighing in the pros and cons, the motion was passed." Pete also stated that, "what sold me in the end, was the deal to get 2 turf fields for the price of 1. Plus, two turf baseball/softball fields and the icing on the cake was a digital electronic sign for FHS." So, Pete “promoted” the idea to the Board. Then the Board approved his idea and decided to spend over $3 million dollars on the new fields. Do you believe that we got 2 fields for the price of 1? Pete, your voice is heard loud and clear! Plus, the decision to get the new digital electronic sign decision was not yet decided as of the March 2013 BOE meeting.)

• Would you have asked your board members to replace the bleachers at Fox High School for $320,000 and sell the old bleachers to another school district that could use them for $30,000 despite the fact that the public was told that the old bleachers were old, damaged and needed to be replaced?
  
  (NOTE: It was announced at the March 2013 BOE meeting that the district didn't realize that the new bleachers wouldn't be able to store any equipment underneath them like the old ones due to their design until after they were installed. They are now erecting a new building for $52,000 to store the equipment in that used to be stored under the bleachers.)

• Would you have asked the school board to hire the daughter-in-law of our current school board president Linda Nash as the Food Nutrition Services Director with her high school diploma and experience working at McDonalds if our school board had asked for your opinion?

• Would you have voted to post the board meeting packets on the district website to be more transparent to the community and not discuss the decision during the open meeting nor document the decision in the board meeting minutes?

• Would you have voted to NOT post the Bill Payments on the district website with the board packets that the board members receive due to privacy concerns - not for the employees, but for the students?

I believe that the majority of parents and patrons in our community wouldn't have asked our school board members to speaking for us as they have. That is why as a community, you need to make a change to our school board by casting your vote on April 2nd in the Fox C-6 School Board election and MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD!

How Our Incumbents Respond To The Community

Our incumbent board members state that they listen to the community and that they are doing this for the kids. However, from my experience, they only listen and respond if you are praising them for doing a great job. Asking your board members to do simple things like correct the school calendar, or correct a school board policy they adopted that didn't meet state law, or asking them to correct school board policies for typographical and grammatical errors and remove points of contacts who retired from the district 4 years ago should not cause them to lash out at you and tell you that all you do is complain. That is NOT how I expect school board members to respond. But, that has been my experience.

Pete Nicholas is running for re-election had the following quote on his campaign Facebook page that tells me that he is out of touch with reality as to how some of our school district administrators feel about "anyone" attending board meetings and addressing their concerns to the board. Here is what Pete Nicholas says on his Facebook page:

Board meetings are openly displayed on the Fox School District website. Anyone can attend the meeting and address their concerns to the board. Attendance of school board meetings is something that I will continue to encourage if I'm re-elected to the school board.

There are several problems with his statements here. One being that Pete says that "Anyone can attend the meeting and address their concerns to the board." I have attended many board meetings and spoken during Public Comment at most of those meetings and addressed my concerns. However, I NEVER received a response from the school board regarding my concerns I presented to the board. What good does it do to address your concerns if your school board does not respond? Also, my concerns weren't documented in the board meeting minutes with anything more than a mention of the fact that I spoke and possibly the topics that I commented on. The meeting minutes said nothing as to WHAT my comments were regarding those topics. As proof that our board members help to cover up those concerns, they will approve the vaguely written minutes at the next month's meeting. That is how our district censors the concerns of the community. Pete's actions speak louder than words about transparency and caring what the community has to say.

Additionally, I have been ridiculed and threatened by individuals online for attending and speaking at board meetings as have others in our school district. Teachers that attended the January 2013 school board meeting were called into the principal's office over the next couple of days after the board meeting and questioned as to why they attended the meeting. Does this seem as if "Anyone can attend the meeting"?

On May 17, 2011, I wrote an email to then school board president Ruth Ann Newman to which she never responded regarding the December 2010 and April 2011 board meetings I attended and spoke at. My email resulted in a very unprofessional response from Superintendent Dianne Brown at the time. Please note that our Superintendent addressed my concerns regarding the poorly documented board meeting minutes. My email also addressed an incident that occurred at the April 2011 board meeting with Mr. Jamie Critchlow who is now our Superintendent's husband. Mr. Critchlow approached me at that meeting and introduced himself. He then proceeded to inform me that he did not appreciate the fact that I went and spoke to the school board regarding his hiring and that if I had any questions, that I should contact him directly. It appears to me that Pete Nicholas is out of touch with reality as to how encouraging he has been with regard to anyone attending board meetings and addressing their concerns to the board.

My email to Ruth Ann Newman and our Superintendent's response can be found in my article published on January 5, 2013 titled:
Emailing Fox C-6 School Board President Results in Superintendent Response

You should not get a "Cease and Desist" letter if you don't vote for our incumbent board members this Tuesday! Hopefully our Superintendent won't be spending anymore taxpayer dollars in the future on "Cease and Desist" letters just because she wants critics to stop talking.

On April 2nd, please tell our Board of Education and our central office administrators that you are ready for change by VOTING IN TWO NEW BOARD MEMBERS!

• Let them know that you want people on the school board that you can trust.
• Let them know that you want school board members who read and follow our school board policies and obey state and federal laws.
• Let them know that you want a school board that will respond to your questions and concerns.
• Let them know that you want a school board that will question our Superintendent and her recommendations.
• Let them know that the school board should demonstrate their Commitment to the Character Education Program as they have adopted in our school board policies.

Accountability and Transparency is important in Open Government and without it, there is a good chance that things are being done that you would not approve of.

So, what does this all mean to you, the parents and patrons of the Fox C-6 School District?

If you really care about the future of our school district and want to improve your child's educational experience and make a positive change in our school district, please vote for Mark Jones and Steve Holloway on Tuesday April 2, 2013!!

Thank you!!

Rich Simpson