The Asheville City Board of Education passed a set of loose guidelines for how it should govern, communicate and act at meetings in a 6-1 vote at its meeting March 10. Board member Pepi Acebo voted against what the district called “board norms.”
“The whole thing doesn’t feel good to me,” Acebo told his fellow board members during a work session March 3. “It’s something that seems like a constraint on individual board members speaking up.”
Board Chair Sarah Thornburg, who worked with Asheville City Schools Superintendent Maggie Fehrman to draft the document during the board’s January retreat, said the intent is not to silence board members but to let the superintendent and her team do their job while better defining the role of the board.
The norms address three areas of board responsibilities. The governance norms encourage members to keep students at the forefront of decisions, trust the superintendent and conduct any business in public. The communications norms set Thornburg as spokesperson for the board and Fehrman for the district, suggesting any stakeholder and media inquiries should go through them. The meeting norms outline basic meeting ethics and encourage members to stay focused on the district’s stated mission and vision.
Acebo said his main concern was that the district was trying to discourage board members from interacting with staff, including principals, by urging them to go through the superintendent with everything. He said it’s his responsibility as an elected board member to monitor and stay informed on what is happening in schools.
“I want to make sure, regardless of how we move forward with this, that we maintain an open door policy with staff and that we continue to be accessible to staff, to families, to parents and, of course, we work with the superintendent to resolve issues,” Acebo said.
Board Vice Chair Rebecca Strimer and board member Amy Ray said they didn’t view the norms that way.
Ray said she thought the norms “don’t preclude us from hearing from any stakeholders, but they ask us to respect the position of the administrators in the buildings in our schools and in our central office.”
Acebo told Xpress by phone March 11 that he saw the guidance not as “norms” but as “aspirational” and wanted to be sure that the board doesn’t get sequestered from the rest of the district.
Board member Liza Kelly told Xpress by phone that while she shared Acebo’s concerns about the norms initially, she says the edits Fehrman made to the norms earlier in the process at members’ request provided the clarity Kelly needed to support them.
Editor’s note: This story was supported by the Fund for Investigative Reporting and Editing.
Pepi is not qualified to be a board member. I have no idea who voted for him and thought he was a good pick.
Pepi wants to target principals and this Board norm prevents that behavior. I don’t agree with the ACS Board on most of those decisions but I applaud them for making the superintendent the point of contact. Board members are not elected to run individual schools.