By Ashley M. Casey
Associate Editor
The Baldwinsville Board of Education is off to a rocky start for the 2019-2020 school year. During the first BOE meeting of the year, held July 8, discussions over who would serve as president and email etiquette became heated.
With BOE member Jeff Marier away at his child’s baseball game for nearly the first two hours of the meeting, the board deadlocked 4-4 on its first attempt to select a board president. Joan Reeves and Jennifer Patruno were nominated. When Marier arrived and another vote was conducted, he broke the tie and Reeves was elected board president 5-4. Christy Bond was elected vice president by the same margin.
Before the vote, Patruno and Reeves spoke about why they each wanted to be president.
Reeves has served on the board since 1981, spending six years as president and 12 years as vice president. She is also a member of the OCM BOCES Board of Education, the Board of Directors of the Central New York School Boards Association, and the Board of Directors of the Onondaga Madison School Boards Association.
Reeves said she would like to see the board return to doing self-assessments and team reviews.
“I’d like to see more of us working as a group and not people doing their own little thing,” Reeves said. “I’ve done this before and I’ve been pretty successful at it, and I’d like to see if we can get back to working as a team again.”
Reeves said the concept of the BOE self-assessment grew out of the superintendent’s evaluation process and other districts have adopted similar self-assessements, but B’ville has fallen out of the habit of doing so in recent years.
“I did it at BOCES and still do it at BOCES, and some people buck it and don’t think it’s necessary, but I just think it’s a real healthy experience,” she said.
Patruno, who was elected to the BOE in 2017, said the board needs new leadership and has issues communicating effectively and adhering to New York state education law and the Open Meetings Law.
“Change is inevitable — we’ve seen change in education, we’ve seen change on this board in each of the last three elections — but progress is optional,” she said. “If we keep voting the same people in, it’s very difficult to have change. I’m incredibly energized, I’m motivated, I have the passion [and] the time to do it right.”
Patruno said she wants the board to take a more active leadership role in the district.
“What I would like to see is more leadership on the board’s side. We get a lot of communication from the district office. We get a lot of direction from them,” she said. “We work as a team, but our communication as a board hasn’t been up to caliber.”
Reeves took issue with Patruno’s criticism, pointing out that she has not been president of the board during Patruno’s tenure. Victor Jenkins was the most recent president, and Reeves was vice president. Jenkins was not reelected to the board this year.
“I haven’t been in the leadership role since you started coming to board meetings, so I don’t agree with what you’re saying. I’m just saying you haven’t seen what I’ve done as president in past years,” Reeves said.
“No, I didn’t see you as president, but I have seen you as vice president and we’ve had some issues,” Patruno said.
Reeves said she did not always agree with Jenkins’ decisions.
“A lot of that is discussions I had with the board president, and if he’s not going to listen to me and do what he should be doing, I can’t make him do it,” she said.
Board member Jim Goulet said he previously served as vice president when Reeves was BOE president.
“Joan did an outstanding job and has a lot of experience with BOCES, and those connections can be very valuable,” Goulet said.
Goulet prefaced his next comments by saying he would prefer to have the discussion in executive session and did not want to be “mean-spirited” or “contrary.” He went on to criticize the frequency, length and content of Patruno’s email communications.
“Jen, you are the ultimate micromanager. You send hundreds, maybe thousands, of emails all the time to the district office driving the administrators crazy. When I got back from my trip this summer, within a three-hour time period there were 17 emails that involved you,” he said. “I think you want to be the superintendent of schools and not the president of the board.”
Goulet pointed out that the three board members who, with Patruno, voted against Reeves’ nomination are the newest BOE members. Brian Dingle and Denise Falso were elected in May, and Kim Sullivan-Dec was elected in 2018.
“I notice the people who support you are the new people who haven’t seen you in action that much,” Goulet said. “I don’t think you’re an appropriate choice for president of the board.”
Patruno thanked Goulet for his comments but said she was following Superintendent Matt McDonald’s requests to include all BOE members on emails to administrators. She added that she adds summaries of board policies, research and state laws to do her due diligence as a board member.
“If you call that micromanaging and overstepping my bounds, I have to disagree with you respectfully, of course,” Patruno said.
Sullivan-Dec acknowledged that the board was having “an uncomfortable conversation” and urged her colleagues to find a “happy medium” between Reeves’ experience and Patruno’s passion.
“I think that there are an incredible amount of strengths all around the table. I do agree with Jen that it does give an opportunity to look at things a little bit differently,” Sullivan-Dec said. “Joan has an incredible amount of experience and Jen has an incredible amount of passion, and I think sometimes that can be misconstrued as micromanaging. I don’t agree that she wouldn’t be a good president.”
Patruno said Goulet should have provided examples of the emails he found objectionable if he was going to comment publicly about them.
“Emails from me that some people consider lengthy, I consider educational. You don’t have to read them, but they absolutely justify [my opinions],” she said. “I was very unwelcome from the beginning and I felt like that’s how I had to communicate so I wouldn’t have happen to me what you just did to me, which you also did publicly when I was running.”
Board member Christy Bond asked that the discussion remain “a respectful, open dialogue.”
“I think we’ve all tried to speak openly and honestly and to come back at Jim with language that seems to blame him — I don’t think we should go there,” Bond said, adding, “He’s giving you his perspective.”
Bond said Superintendent McDonald, who was absent from the July 8 BOE meeting, had expressed that some of the emails were “overwhelming and inappropriate.”
Sullivan-Dec said despite the disagreements July 8, the BOE is “an incredibly functional board.”
“For the public record, I think we’ve done a very good job of moving the district in the right direction, and I think we’re lucky that we have two people that are passionate that want to serve in the presidency role,” she said.
Despite the stalemate of the presidency vote, the meeting proceeded after Assistant Superintendent of Management Jamie Rodems consulted one of the district’s attorneys, Colleen Heinrich, of Ferrara Fiorenza PC. Heinrich opined via text message that if a new president could not be chosen, the acting president could still conduct the meeting. Jenkins, the previous president, is no longer on the board, but his vice president — Joan Reeves — was present, so the organizational meeting continued under her leadership.
When Marier arrived nearly two hours into the board meeting, the BOE turned to its roundtable discussion. The first item on the roundtable agenda was “open discussions and email communications.”
Patruno asked Marier to start the discussion since he had requested it for the agenda. She also asked if he had examples of emails he found concerning.
“I think it’s important that you bring it up because you’re kind of leaving it out there that we’re not acting with integrity and doing things that we shouldn’t be doing,” Patruno said.
“You’re putting words in my mouth, Jen, that I did not say. I just wanted to bring it up that I thought more business was being done in email than should be,” Marier said.
Marier said citizens can request the BOE’s email communications under the Freedom of Information Law but said most business should be discussed in open session. He said he wanted to have a general discussion about what is appropriate for email and did not have specific examples immediately in mind.
“There must have been an email that you were uncomfortable with for you to ask,” Patruno said.
“If you want to make this personal, that’s fine,” Marier said. He began to look through his phone to find examples.
BOE member Matt Yager weighed in on the topic.
“I think that the back-and-forth exchange is a little much sometimes,” he said.
Yager acknowledged that administrators had asked the board to copy each other on their communications, but he said receiving multiple forwarded emails could be excessive and confusing.
“When we forward, it’s helpful to me when I’m not copied in four steps down the string and then going back trying to follow it,” he said.
Bond said that when she was new to the board, she sometimes struggled knowing what would be appropriate for email versus open discussion. She said Marier added the roundtable to the agenda when he was BOE president.
“I think [the roundtable] has done a great deal to give us a forum to ask questions and be educated in things and ask for information that we might want to have,” she said. “Our guiding principle ought to be the public deserves to know what we’re doing. When we do it via email, even though it is FOIL-able, I doubt that members of the public are going to to take the time to FOIL all of our emails. … Most of our discussions should occur right here.”
Patruno asked what board members should do if they want to propose an item for the roundtable discussion, ask for background information on a topic or have a question about board policy or state law.
“I haven’t noticed that most of the email is asking for an article or a legal opinion. What I have noticed is that we have full-blown conversations over email and then we get to the board meeting and just vote on stuff, so the public is never able to hear the interchange back and forth,” Bond said.
Then, Marier read one such email exchange out loud, which took him about eight minutes. The email thread, which took place over Father’s Day weekend, began with Patruno relaying to McDonald complaints she had heard from families about their schedules at Baker High School. The conversation included emails from Deputy Superintendent Joe DeBarbieri saying he and McDonald “spent a significant amount of time this Father’s Day weekend” trying to solve scheduling issues that they ultimately determined were “no different than any other school year.”
Bond said while it is important to listen to the public’s concerns and relay them to administrators, board members should advise their constituents of what they can do to address the problem with the appropriate faculty, staff or administrators. Marier said the board’s role is to set policies for the district as a whole and it is not the board’s place to discuss individual students’ issues at length.
“There’s a difference between raising the issue and handing it off to an administrator to handle and continuing to churn on it,” he said.
Ultimately, the board paused the email discussion since DeBarbieri and McDonald were both absent from the meeting.
“We’re not really making any progress here,” Bond said.
The PAC-B recording of the July 8 meeting can be seen at vimeo.com/347175295. The BOE next meets at 7 p.m. Monday, Aug. 26, at Durgee Junior High School. Agendas and minutes are available at boarddocs.cnyric.org/bville/Board.nsf/Public.
