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It remains unclear if the Westport Board of Education will engage the public and answer questions put forth in a petition Thursday night, but parents are hopeful it does.
The board will meet at 7:30 p.m. at Bedford Middle School in a session forced by a petition filed under state statutes by parents, which included 20 questions they want answered.
The petition includes questions surrounding Ejay Clark, a Bedford Middle School science teacher who wants his job back, and many more on the board’s tenure process.
Thursday’s agenda includes two items—an introduction from board attorney Tom Mooney and public comment. There is no discussion item listed.
Clark resigned from his post last spring after being told school officials planned to recommend his dismissal. He attempted to withdraw his resignation and force a hearing on his dismissal, but School Superintendent Elliott Landon said then he would not allow him to withdraw his resignation.
Parents have been asking the board to address the issue and were told by board Chairwoman Mary Parmelee it could do nothing.
“They should be concerned and want to answer them,” said Jennifer Clement, the parent who led the petition drive.
Clement said she believes that a hearing—which the law requires—should be a give and take between the public and the board on the issues in the petition.
“I think the spirit of the law would be for there to be a give and take, but it seems they are going by the narrowest interpretation,” she said. “We just want a dialogue and want to be partners. We don’t want to fight. I don’t understand why this has to be adversarial.”
Landon did not return phone calls today.
The Board of Education was approached by concerned parents and had several opportunities to engage in the discussion on their own terms. They waived that right through their repeated lack of response. The successful petition drive now makes this a public issue and requires that the Board of Education respond to the questions raised. Hiding behind lawyers and drawing on razor thin interpretations of state statutes to avoid any kind of discussion only makes their reticence that much more suspicious. We’re talking about school procedure and policy, for pete’s sake; not nuclear secrets.
As a parent of two school age children in Westport, and having a residency that spans 38 years, I have real concerns about the state of our board of Education and the leadership of our schools. When our board spends taxpayer dollars to hire a lawyer to tell the taxpayers they have nothing to say to us, we have a problem.
When parents and students appeal to the Board of Education in an open forum, and our superintendent chooses to gather the principal, vice-principal, Assistant Superintendent in charge of personnel, and a union representative into a room, and calls that teacher to that room to wrongly accuse him of petitioning the students, and calls him a
For those of you who don’t think that this whole situation pertains to you, ie. either you have children who won’t be in middle school for years, or don’t have children at all, YOUR tax dollars go to paying for the Westport School System, and you should definitely be interested in how this Board of Education and the Superintendent of Westport Schools will not participate in discourse with the public, unless it is about cookies in the cafeteria and new boilers in the schools or other “safe subjects” which don’t necessarily get at the heart of education of our children. The unfair coercion of Ejay Clark, an outstanding science teacher, to tender his resignation under duress and promise of letters of recommendation which he never received, is a practice I would think none of the citizens of Westport would want to support.
Please show your support of having open and frank discussion with the Board that we elected, and to attract and hold on to inspirational teachers like Mr. Clark, by showing up at a special BOE meeting tomorrow night at Bedford Middle School at 7:30 p.m.
I urge you to show our Board of Education and our Superintendent of schools that our voices count, and we expect a discussion of important subjects which affect our children and our community.