And Bob Caudle writes: “there are people who don’t listen to the will of the people, are out of touch with the common person and attempt to go spend money willy-nilly planning a pie-in-the-sky project. We call them members of the Fayetteville School Board.” (http://www.nwaonline.net/articles/2009/09/19/columns/bob_caudle/092009caudle.txt )

And Brenda Blagg writes: “Significantly, they took false encouragement from polls taken in March and May that suggested they could win. Those poll results were screened to reflect only the views of voters who had participated in special elections over the past few years, not the broader electorate that showed up in record numbers on election day.” (http://www.nwaonline.net/articles/2009/09/17/columns/brenda_blagg/091809blagg.txt )

Polling is another useful way for school officials to gather information. Unfortunately, the poll they commissioned seemed more like a way to gather support for what was already decided than a way to collect information. The poll was done after most if not all major decisions had been made. And it is expensive to conduct polls, so school officials can’t employ this technique very often.

In the end, school officials have to act like leaders who gather bits of information from a variety of sources, including public meetings, polls, past elections, and their general familiarity with the community. And then they have to take all of that information and lead the community toward what they think is educationally desirable but within political feasibility.

Thank you for your reply. You said in your piece that the breakout groups arrived at the same concepts. They did not. The charrettes were held as a way to gain public input on the physical form of the buiding and they resulted in a variety of physical forms. The fact that the Trail of Tears was given as an underlying concept for the genius loci of the site did not result in the homogeneity you say it did. Most members of the public would not be able to make a connection between “the Trail of Tears” and a school building if they tried. (I will not claim that they would be able to if they had attended the new Fayetteville High School. Aesthetic and symbolic sensitivity in relation to the environment support athletics even less than art and music do.)

I believe that you have misunderstood my post. I explicitly say that seeking public input was fine. The problem was in mistaking that input for the voice of the people, which it definitely was not judging from the election result.

Leadership involves combining input from vocal, but atypical participants in public meetings with the leader’s assessment of what is educationally desirable and likely to garner broader popular support.

It’s not easy, and I believe that school officials tried in good faith to gather input. But I think they gave that input too much weight and failed to anticipate what the broader community might say.

And the way that consultants directed the public discussion was sometimes obvious and heavy-handed, as in the case of Tony Wagner, or more subtle and perhaps even unintentional, as in the case of the Concordia consultants for the charrettes.

If you want to see an indication of how Concordia led the discussion toward the Trail of Tears, see p. 8 of their report: http://www.fayar.net/imagesBoard/FHS_Final_Report.pdf .

On it they provide a “Site Description” that consists of 207 words. Of those 207 words 89 (43%) were about the Trail of Tears. It is clearly the most prominent part of the site description that informed the design discussions.

Personally, I like the Trail of Tears theme, but my point is that consultants have a way of leading the discussion in certain directions even when everyone is trying to seek open and diverse input. That’s a fine thing to do, but no one should mistake it for the voice of the people.

As I recall, the school district made a broad effort to solicit input for the design of the new school. Meetings and charrettes were held on different days and at different times in order to make it easier for a variety of people to attend. If that wasn’t an adequate approach, blame it on the apathy of the excluded, not the school district. It’s not like the thing was run in secret.

Newspaper reports of the charrettes indicated that the break-out groups came up with different scenarios. (A few of them were displayed on the district’s web site.) When the groups came together, the small-group concept was adopted by consensus. It might have been consensus of the loudest, but it was not a directed result as Mr. Greene claims.

Mr. Greene’s commentary almost sounds as though he thinks parents shouldn’t be engaged in their kids’ education. The suggestion that the building scheme should come from on high sounds to me like the same attitude that has led to so many problems in the public schools: the professionals know best; let them take care of everything.

I’m not saying that the school district administration shouldn’t get some hammering for the failure of the millage. But I think that Mr. Greene is using the wrong hammer.