HEADLINE: Spencerville SDA Church Again Tramples Democracy with Rigged Delegation to the 2022 SAA Constituency Meeting.
SAA’s Head of School doesn’t ever hold town hall meetings or general assemblies to inform parents or to engage in Q&A. This is a weakness and failure of leadership.
SAA’s Secret School Board holds its meetings without offering any known protocol for concerned parents to express concerns or submit agenda items, and heaven forbid - a public comment period.
The result is an Aristocratic cryptocracy.
Yet once a year, only due to the requirements of its own constitution, SAA holds the closest thing to a Town Hall meeting you'll ever see around here, the Annual Constituency Meeting. It's not well suited to do so, but this event is in theory supposed to be the time and place for oversight - by the rank and file membership of the Spencerville Church - of the Aristocracy’s often dark-web operations of the SAA machinery.
But in reality, the Constituency Meeting (CM)is a highly-propagandized and tightly controlled show and tell by the Head of School to report on administrative operations for the past year (claims and figures presented at break-neck speed without documentation), along with a financial report, and a Home & School Association report.
The Constituency Meeting is run by SAA’s Secret School Board Chairperson, Mark Noble, with his Vice-Chairperson "pitbull", German Rodriguez, who last year employed fancy parliamentary tricks and maneuvers on multiple occasions to shut down Delegates’ questions or criticisms, and even tried to shut down the comments of all non-delegate attendees. For more details see Delegate Q&A - Part 1 & Delegate Q&A - Part 2.
It’s really not an exercise of institutional transparency and constituent oversight, as much as it is a protective full court defense from any real questioning or criticism of SAA administration - Mrs. Bowerman.
On paper, the decision makers at a Constituency Meeting are the Delegates. In reality, the Constituency Meeting has become a well-orchestrated group-think conformity rubber stamping of whatever Bowerman and Noble say, with Rodriguez as self-designated “Sergeant-At-Arms” shutting down questions and dissenting voices.
Who appoints the CM Delegates? Well the members of the constituent church, of course, who cast votes for them. There is only one constituent church for SAA - the Spencerville SDA Church. Congregational members casting votes for their delegates to the CM is how the model has at least been presented for years and years in the past – church members submit names, those named become delegates. Very simple and very democratic. For instance in 2021, Senior Pastor Chad Stuart sent an email to the church membership soliciting nominating votes for CM delegates. So you would think that the ordinary exercise of democracy and voting would result in the top 81 vote getters ending up as delegates, right? How hard could it be to tally votes and names? After all, the process was even automated and votes were cast electronically.
But as we reported in June 2021 [Constituency Meeting or Couples Retreat?], Spencerville Church quite clearly disenfranchised its own membership by doctoring the votes. The law of averages dictates that the top 81 vote-getters should result in a democratically unpredictable mish-mashed and random combination of males and females, many younger people but mostly older ones, many individual parents of current students here, some parents of former students there, a few grandparents sprinkled in, a few alumni too, and some other names of education professionals that have no official connection whatsoever to SAA, and still other names that seemingly make no sense at all but yet made the cut anyway. That is what democracy looks like – imperfect, not highly coordinated, a little messy, often predictable in larger trends, but unpredictable in smaller details.
So is that what the 2021 list of Delegates looked like? Not at all.
Instead of a random array like what might show up for jury duty at your local courthouse, what you got was an obviously engineered, highly-groomed and neatly-ordered array of over a dozen married couples (sometimes with their child barely of adult age), plus the spouses of existing SAA Secret School Board members “randomly” chosen to complete another dozen or so married couples, plus a few outliers such as newcomers largely unknown to most church members, oh and the local Chesapeake Conference HR chief likely known to only a small handful of members – who despite not regularly attending or being involved at the church “garnered just enough votes” to make the cut. Coincidence? Simply a reflection of the raw voting totals? A fair and secure election? No way - not a chance.
That result was rigged.
Not only that, but the process included church board members appointing themselves as delegates, while simultaneously negating the actual votes of their congregational family. We received information that the votes of several members for their delegate choice(s) did not show up on that list – i.e. their votes were nullified. Beyond the blinding, clownish conflict of interest and breach of ethics of voting in oneself or one’s spouse - the further act of nullifying members’ votes is actual election fraud. Neither SAA nor the Spencerville Church has ever denied or disavowed this corrupt nullification of democracy. Call it a high-tech form of throwing loaded dice. Or the modern ecclesiastical forms of the literacy test, poll tax, or grandfather clause borrowed from the days of Jim Crow. The leadership of Spencerville Church has shown itself to be highly crafty and skilled at voting fraud and electoral disenfranchisement – of its own membership! These tactics are straight out of a corrupt, third world, banana-republic.
That result was rigged.
If you are a Spencerville Church member, take note that this was done in your name and by your supposed congregational authority - which should both nauseate you and embarrass you. Your collective democratic congregational voice is being made into a mockery. You should speak up to make your objections heard and to hold accountable those who did it. Who is that? Well whoever operates the levers of power at 16325 New Hampshire Avenue - your pastoral staff and church board.
That result was rigged.
By the way, if you are a SAA parent and non-Spencerville Church member, well then judging from how easily the constituent church members’ votes are ignored, you can as easily guess how little your voice matters. Less than zero.
But it’s too late to fix 2021 now, because this is 2022. Which brings us up to just the past 7 days. Ever since its release back in July 2021, the official SAA calendar has listed the Annual Constituency Meeting for May 22, 2022. There’s nothing wrong with that. Except that it was just changed to May 15, and done so with the harried and hurried consequence that has again compromised the integrity of the delegate selection process.
A May 15th 2022 Annual Constituency Meeting had never been announced anywhere – not in the church bulletin or e-mail newsletter, not even in the calendar from the bulletin of April 23, 2022:
let alone SAA's newsletter or email – until it was published for the very first time anywhere on April 28, 2022 in SAA’s Buzz newsletter.
Yet by some miracle, just 1 day later on April 29, 2022, a list of 65 delegates is published in the Spencerville Church bulletin for April 30, 2022:
Was there a voting period sometime between April 28 and April 29 for the membership to exercise its democratic prerogative to choose delegates?
Was there a church business meeting during that 24-hour period to outsource the entire delegate selection to a secret and closed committee?
Was there a reference or announcement in any of the Spencerville Church bulletins or newsletters giving notice of such an electoral process?
No.
This is another instance of Spencerville Church either incompetently bungling a fairly simple democratic congregational voting exercise, or worse, deliberately taking a knee to the neck of democracy for at least the second consecutive year.
This result is rigged.
But like journalists should do, we went to an official source and directly asked Spencerville SDA Church Senior Pastor Chad Stuart to explain this latest apparent trampling of democracy:
As of this publishing, we have heard nothing back.
But no shock there, people - you are entitled to no explanation of anything that happens by the Aristocracy - even if you’re a long-time, tuition-paying, tithe-paying member of the sole constituent church. Therefore let all readers take notice that our analysis has not yet been challenged or refuted, even by the Senior Pastor when given an opportunity to explain.
To be clear, we are not making a judgement or offering an opinion on the fitness of the individual 2022 Delegates. They are collectively fine, honorable and upstanding people. Perhaps their cumulative IQ and judgment is stellar and they will be the best class of CM delegates ever. Yet even if this is true, it does not change the democratically irregular manner in which they were selected, nor does it save the entire slate from a cloud of illegitimacy. We do not believe that they were chosen by the church membership. Instead, we believe that they were chosen in secret behind closed doors, probably by the church board in a manner closely controlled and overseen by Pastor Stuart and his staff (the church board).
This result is rigged.
So if you take a moment to analyze the 2021 Delegate List
and then analyze the 2022 Delegate List ,
and then do a simple comparison of the two:
.....you will see some pretty significant changes.
Instead of another repeat of the 2021 Couples’ Retreat, and despite several church board members again approving themselves to be delegates (an almost comical breach of conflict of interest ethics), you can see a fairly wholesale turnover to much less of a sweetheart, marital hand-holding model. This is actually a very good development, albeit a contrived and manufactured one. But was it a mere coincidence of unprompted institutional self-correction? Or a course correction in reaction to developments set in motion and triggered by a movement for more transparency? You be the judge. Either way, the change from the 2021 Couples’ Retreat, and for that matter from the Couples Retreats’ of the several preceding years, to the 2022 Delegate List is like the change from night to day.
We will run some more analysis on this list in the days to come. As a service to delegates and non-delegates alike, we will also post a list of questions for SAA to answer at “The Show.”
If you are not already familiar with our 2021 SAA Constituency Meeting Series, read those posts in preparation for this year’s Show:
The 2021 SAA Constituency Meeting:
A Series of Independent, Unauthorized, and Unofficial Reports
-Lillian Hepburn-Richmond
(A Cohort of Concerned Parents)
Shining Light. Breaking Silence. Holding Accountable.
We’ve got Eyes On SAA.
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