SAA held its annual Constituency Meeting on June 15, 2021. This is a very significant event for the entire school community of teachers, students, parents, and members of the Spencerville SDA Church to receive important information about the school’s operations, personnel, enrollment, educational programs, finances and more. This meeting is a crucial check of the cardiac health of representative democracy and constituent oversight for the Spencerville Church. Does SAA belong to Mrs. Bowerman, the only surviving administrator from 2020-21? Or the Board Chairperson? Or the SAA School Board, or more likely to its Executive Committee? Or only to the Chesapeake Conference, the landlord of the school’s property, and its Department of Education? Or to the Spencerville Church Pastor and Church Board? Or does SAA actually belong to the constituent members of Spencerville Church?
The importance of this meeting is magnified by the culture of secrecy that enshrouds this institution, beginning and ending with a school board charged with oversight of the entire school. The most distinguishing characteristic of the SAA School Board is that its membership is a tightly held secret. Yes, you read that correctly: you are not allowed to know who serves on the SAA School Board even though you have paid tens of thousands of dollars in tuition to SAA, and perhaps many thousands more in tithe and offering to Spencerville Church. Do your own experiment and ask SAA Head Principal Bowerman, SAA Board Chair Mark Noble (the only publicly confirmed member; that is if you know his unpublished phone number or email address), or Spencerville Church Senior Pastor Chad Stuart for a list of the school board members. Please post a comment to this blogpost with their responses. If these individuals act consistent with past requests made by others for this information, you will be given some unsatisfying rationalization, but you’ll get no list of names.
However if you hold “elite” status at SAA, then you probably already have this information because several board members are your close friends, you’ve traveled together or visited each other’s houses over the summer, and/or their names are on your speed dial. The elites have by now quietly been given all the inside information by SAA Admin about things like the Judie Rosa termination fiasco, while the only message to the masses is “we’re not at liberty to talk [to non-elites] about this.” In this two-tiered system at SAA there is no confidentiality restriction for the upper-tiered elites. However the lower-tiered, tuition-paying drones do not even know who the school board members are, and thus cannot contact them to transmit their concerns for representation and advocacy at school board meetings. As twisted an idea as this may seem to SAA's school board, this is entirely appropriate and exactly how a representative democracy is supposed to work. However SAA does not deem non-elites worthy of this privilege, which actually is not a privilege at all, but in fact an entitlement to full members in any open society. But whether you are elite or drone, make no mistake thinking SAA is an open society – it most definitely is not. It is much closer to being a country club for elites that tolerates drones only to comply with SDA franchise requirements and to subsidize its budget. Democracy does not live there anymore, if it ever did. Like a brutalized police suspect, democracy could not breathe and has died of hypoxia secondary to asphyxiation.
This is why carefully recruited, groomed, and quietly selected elite board members may serve anonymously and insulated from accountability for board decisions, completely nullifying and rendering moot the representative process as a nameless, faceless, and mysterious committee answerable to nothing but itself and its feudal landlord, the Chesapeake Conference. It might remind you of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Reserve, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court, or maybe just a group of wizards in green suits, heavy makeup and top hats hiding behind a dark curtain and working all the controls. We feel that this invisible committee has earned and well deserves the name of the “Secret School Board.” The Secret School Board can very quickly prove us wrong and dispel this label by releasing the names of its members so that you parents and other stakeholders can employ representative governance to work its own “magic.”
Well once a year, the wizards have to pull back the curtain and let all the non-wizards take a quick look at the machinery – at the annual Constituency Meeting. Don’t call it an open, well-publicized town hall meeting designed to encourage everyone that is interested to attend and speak. Instead it is a very tightly scripted, polished and controlled presentation under very limited time constraints whose only official attendees with rights to speak (for a whole 2 minutes, before being silenced by meeting cops) are carefully and undemocratically chosen delegates. See our June 10th post: "Constituency Meeting or Couples’ Retreat?"
But even those delegates are kept at an arm’s length distance by not being given the most important information in written form. Yes, delegates this year were handed a meeting agenda,
a brief summary (“Minutes”) of the last constituency meeting in 2019,
and an audit opinion of a financial statement that you need a finance degree to decipher and the patience of Job to finish reading.
But the most interesting and important information is conveyed in the “Principal’s Report” which is delivered orally at such breakneck speed that unless you can do professional shorthand, you will not be able to take complete notes while also paying close attention to the presentation – like trying to drink water from a fire hose. We have for years heard requests from delegates that the information in the Principal’s Report should be provided in written form to the constituents. To our knowledge, this reasonable and logical request has not been honored at any previous constituency meeting, nor was this information provided at this year’s meeting. The wizards only want you to take a quick peek at the machinery, not to stare or gawk at it lest you try to reverse-engineer the machinery, or figure out that the wizards actually have no magical powers.
We write this Prelude to once again highlight how totalitarian and anti-democratic things have become at SAA. Even though the school is required by its own constitution to report to its sole and exclusive constituency (the Spencerville SDA Church), it does so in a way that is quiet, rushed, and unwritten so that even the hand-picked delegate couples will take away as little as possible in their memory banks, and no significant written details in their hands. So the next time that the SAA administration or Secret School Board asks you to “just trust them” with things like, for example, the unexplained disappearance and ultimate firing of the Elementary School Principal in the thick of the Spring semester, ask yourself if that trust has been earned with their track record of undisclosed board membership, the inconspicuous elitist grooming and selection of board members, meetings that are practically held in secret, a pattern of refusal to hear and give audience to legitimate concerns of stakeholders, the disingenuous corporate dodgeball messages about seismic administrative personnel changes (and everything else), the undemocratic selection of constituency delegates, the quick-peek constituency meetings, and every other mechanism that has been engineered to disenfranchise stakeholders en masse while consolidating power in the hands of a small number of power players, some of them sitting unchallenged and unchanged for years on end.
So before you actually receive our report on the Constituency Meeting in our next post, we ask you to consider and ponder the following questions that we posted back on June 27th about the 2021 Constituency Meeting:
10 Questions About “The Best Kept Secret” SAA Constituency Meeting
1. Did you even know this meeting was taking place? Probably not, unless you were paying very close attention to announcements in the Spencerville Church, or to this blog.
2. Did SAA send a notice or announcement of any kind to its families about this meeting? No, unless we missed it, neither SAA’s Head Principal nor its Board Chair sent any notice at all to its students, parents, or families of this meeting.
3. Was the Constituency Meeting open to the public to attend and ask questions? We have no official answer or confirmation about that. If such a thing were encouraged, wouldn’t one expect for this information to be conspicuously announced within the school community.
4. What happens at a CM? No meeting agenda was published on the church or school website.
5. What happened at this CM? No report of the meeting has been published on the church or school website.
6. Who are the delegates? You would have to so some digging for this one, but if you happen to be a member of the Spencerville Church and scour their bulletin you would have seen a list. Or you may have come across this list on our blog’s informative and thought-provoking post from June 10 on delegate selection "Constituency Meeting or Couples’ Retreat?"
7. Was it livestreamed? No. SAA did not even send one e-mail to its parents about this meeting where important and crucial information is presented.
8. Was it recorded for later viewing? It would have been possible to do so with modern technology for the benefit of those community stakeholders who were interested in attending, but could not for legitimate reasons like summer vacation travel , work scheduling conflicts, or personal health concerns, etc.
9. What documentation was provided to delegates? At past constituency meetings, there have been repeated requests for information to be distributed in writing to attendees. SAA families weren’t provided any information for this meeting (or even any official notice it was going to happen), so important information about the school is apparently only provided to the delegates.
10. Were any resolutions or decisions made at the meeting? If there were, SAA hasn’t informed its families about it.
- Lillian Hepburn-Richmond (a cohort of concerned parents)
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