Trigger Warning: The following should be disturbing to the ordinary SAA parent, and downright embarrassing to the masters of the SAA universe who traffic in silence, hubris and disenfranchisement of the masses - all under the cover of religion.
Which scheme of rule does SAA’s governance most closely resemble?
A. Aristocracy
B. Oligarchy/Plutocracy
C. Cryptocracy
D. Monarchy
E. Feudalism
F. Representative Democracy
Before you answer, let’s review some basics. We are all familiar with the concept of a monarchy, “the rule of one”, often claiming the right to rule is God-given and passing it down by inheritance in dynastic fashion. Aristocracy is a form of government that keeps power in the hands of a small, privileged ruling class, the aristocrats: “the rule of the best”. Oligarchy (or plutocracy) is “the rule of the few” in a structure where power rests exclusively with a small number of people distinguished by characteristics such as nobility, fame, wealth, and religious or political control. Feudalism is a system of customs and obligations revolving around land owned by the wealthy lords (nobility), the vassals (warriors serving the lords as a private army) and the destitute serf farmer (like sharecroppers in the post-slavery era). A cryptocracy is “rule by secret” where actual power resides not with publicly elected representatives, but with a shadow government composed of private individuals exercising power behind the scenes, beyond the scrutiny of democratic institutions. A Democratic Republic (“rule of the people through their elect”), our form of government here in the U.S.A., is the citizenry choosing persons to make laws and decisions on their behalf and who owe the duty of accountability to their electors/constituents in a system of transparency and open communication.
Now let’s apply this basic framework to what we have observed and know of SAA’s administration and Secret School Board.
The identities of SAA school board members are undisclosed and a closely-held secret by SAA or Spencerville Church. Multiple requests over several months from different persons for this information have all been denied. This point was raised at the Constituency Meeting this past June, and duly ignored. Before publishing this post, we gave SAA yet another chance to provide this information. Email to Mark Noble 11-29-21 and Email to Mrs. Bowerman 11-29-21 Absolutely no response was provided.
SAA community members obviously cannot contact unknown school board members with their feedback, concerns, requests, etc.
Unless you happen to personally stumble across a school board member with the irresistible urge to spontaneously blurt out their privileged position to you, then only the “well-connected” know who they are.
School board governance and decision-making is therefore isolated from anyone except the “well-connected.” By isolating itself from the rest of the SAA Community, the Secret School Board is also depriving itself of intelligent solutions and potentially fabulous ideas (or dumb ones) that could be generated from the giant and untapped resource of SAA community members.
During the entire yearlong school shutdown period (with crucial decisions at stake, like keeping classes online instead of in-person), did SAA even one time send an email or post a link to the Zoom meetings held by the Secret School Board? Nothing could have been easier. But no, not one single time was such a link posted to the SAA community.
A very clear pattern of the Secret School Board ignoring and dismissing concerned parents emerged during the Q&A period of the last Constituency Meeting. The Main Event 1 and The Main Event 2
Only recently did so many find out that the Chairperson of the Secret School Board is a person named Mark Noble, mainly because 2 letters in his name were emailed to the school community. Elementary Principal Update and Message From the School Board Chair. Those letters (containing belated, misleading, and useless information about the scandal surrounding Judie Rosa's wrongful termination) were from a buffer email, so Mr. Noble’s actual email address was noticeably concealed. Sure the “well-connected” already have his email and cellphone in their speed dial/personal contacts. But how does your average, ordinary, unconnected SAA parent effectively contact Mr. Noble? Do the unconnected even know what he looks like? We actually have his email and could easily reveal it publicly on this blog; but we want SAA to give it to the entire school community - along with the names and emails of all the members of the Secret School Board.
At the June 15th Constituency Meeting (CM), Mr. Noble disclosed that the Secret School Board’s Vice Chairperson is a person named German Rodriguez. But you would not know this unless you attended the CM (for which SAA gave absolutely no advance notice, nor recorded/archived for you), or unless you read Eyes On SAA’s series of unofficial and unauthorized reports on the CM. What you would know about Mr. Rodriguez from our reporting is that he is an expert at using parliamentary procedural tricks to try to silence concerned parents (including official CM delegates and all non-delegates) from being heard at the only somewhat-open forum SAA ever offers. What’s Mr. Rodriguez’s email? Unless you already know him, you’d cluelessly walk right by the Secret School Board’s second in command in the school parking lot. We actually have his email too and could easily reveal it publicly on this blog; but we want SAA to give it to the entire school community - along with the names and emails of all the members of the Secret School Board.
[STOP THE PRESSES! REAL-TIME, PRE-PUBLICATION UPDATE:
We literally just saw SAA's new and improved website: https://spencervilleacademy.org/
Very nice job, SAA! So long www.spaac.net. Anyway, we took the new website for a brief test drive, and so far, so good. We also quickly found this under Parent Resources:
"Useful Contacts. Contact information for the school, Board members, and our Conference Education Department."
Wow, this looks really promising! Could it really be that SAA is giving us all an early Christmas present by telling us who is on the Secret School Board (i.e., those people who magically read our minds and effectively represent the concerns of our innermost, uncommunicated thoughts?)? Yay!
Alright, let's open up the gift box - we're so excited! Transparency is about to enter the building! Here we go, let's zoom in.....
Huh? That's it? What the hell? Do we have only a 2-person School Board now? Seriously Mrs. B? Where the hell are the names of all the rest of the school board? And where's the "Useful Contact" info? Good, you finally posted 2 names, but our readers already know who the Chairperson and Vice-Chairperson are (thanks to Eyes On SAA). But how do lesser and unconnected SAA stakeholders CONTACT them without an email address or a phone number? Smoke signal? Billboard? Stalk the afternoon pickup line? Gee, thanks for the "Useless Contacts".
[Okay folks, false alarm, nothing to see there. Sorry for that. Start the presses back up to our regularly scheduled programming]
9. Secret School Board members should be nominated and approved based on objective meritorious criteria such as familiarity and involvement with the school community, demonstrated volunteer commitment, past experience in similar service. Some leadership skill and independence of thought would be great too.
10. But from what we have gathered, board members are quietly schmoozed and recruited behind the scenes by Mrs. Bowerman, Mr. Noble, or perhaps even Pastor Stuart applying some unknown criteria, maybe pledges of personal loyalty and promises not to dissent from positions advanced by SAA leadership - maybe secret handshakes or Latin passwords. We would love to find out that we are 100% wrong about this. Let SAA and Spencerville Church clarify this process publicly and report on how past and current members were recruited and approved.
11. What issues are coming before the board of your child’s school (i.e., the board’s agenda)? Nobody knows - except the Secret School Board.
12. What decisions are made by the board (i.e., what do their meeting “minutes” reveal)? Nobody knows - except the Secret School Board.
Secrecy is not just a bug in SAA’s system, it is a feature. In fact, secrecy is this system’s most distinguishing feature.
The dysfunction here cannot be overstated.
But to truly contextualize SAA’s dysfunction, compare it to the following SDA academies from across the continent which openly, if not proudly, post the names, pictures, and/or contact info of the persons who serve on their school boards. And these are just a half-dozen SDA academies that we quickly and easily found online:
Had your daily dose of irony yet today? Check out this page from the newsletter of Hinsdale Adventist Academy in Illinois, featuring its Board of Trustees. Does that school sound familiar to you? It should. Hinsdale won the SAA-sponsored and self-inflicted “Judie Rosa Sweepstakes” before the ink was even dry on Mark Noble’s Message From the School Board Chair which "broke" the 35-day old news that Mrs. Rosa was gone from SAA.
Final score: Hinsdale won big, SAA lost miserably.
Now compare some other area Christian schools, and then the public school system for our own Montgomery County, Maryland.
All the preceding examples expose the aberrant and abject stupidity of SAA’s iron-gripped concealment of the identity of its own school board members. It’s actually quite embarrassing and makes all of us in this community look like some dang fools or lemmings who cheerfully tolerate disenfranchisement. Imagine you’re at a holiday party talking to another parent about your kid's education, and then you stand up to loudly and proudly announce to all the party people that your kid's school keeps its board members secret from you, despite charging you tens of thousands of dollars in tuition, and that it fired its best administrator in decades, with 25% of the school year remaining - over a goodbye email. Yeah, that ain't gon' happen. Holiday party tip: avoid talking about SAA. Change the topic to anything else - fracking, penguins, bubble tea, 80’s soft rock band "Air Supply", etc.
In all fairness, the Secret School Board has taken one very small “baby step.” For the first time ever that our staff knows about, the October 21 edition of the Buzz featured a conspicuous, Page 1 announcement for the next Secret School Board meeting:
We don’t think that this unprecedented step is just a coincidence, or that it would ever have happened without our external pressure being applied - we know that our readers include SAA’s administration. We here at Eyes On SAA believe we deserve some credit for this. And while this is a huge step for the Secret School Board, in context it is but a hardly noticeable shuffle in the general direction of transparency. A baby has to crawl before she can walk. So we commend the Secret School Board on taking its first itty, bitty baby step toward transparency. It should be encouraged by the old Chinese proverb that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
So we return to the opening question: Which scheme of rule does SAA’s governance most closely resemble?
A. Aristocracy
B. Oligarchy/Plutocracy
C. Cryptocracy
D. Monarchy
E. Feudalism
F. Representative Democracy
We first eliminate the patently obvious wrong answer: “Representative Democracy”. Nothing at SAA looks, sounds, smells, or acts like a representative democracy. This is why carefully recruited, groomed, and quietly selected board members may serve anonymously and insulated from accountability to SAA parents, students, and teachers for board decisions - completely nullifying and rendering moot the representative process as a nameless, faceless, and mysterious committee answerable to nothing or no one but itself. Unannounced and inaccessible meetings virtually held in secret, a pattern of refusal to hear and pay attention to legitimate concerns of stakeholders, the disingenuous corporate dodgeball messaging about decisions to remain 80% online during the pandemic or seismic administrative personnel changes; 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. This invisible committee has earned its name: “Secret School Board.” It has failed every opportunity to 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 do its thing, or for the school board ghosts to “show their work” by releasing board meeting agendas and minutes.
Democracy does not live at SAA anymore, if it ever did. Like a brutalized police detainee, the Secret School Board’s knee has deliberately crushed the neck of democracy - so it could not breathe and now has died of hypoxia secondary to asphyxiation.
We urge a new infusion of democracy, accountability to constituents, and of new leadership in the power structure at SAA. There needs to be a change in the SAA School Board: its Chairperson and Vice-Chairperson who march in lockstep, the undisclosed members of the Executive Committee - some of whom we believe have been in place for up to an entire generation (no one really knows because the list is secret), their unlimited terms, and the backroom manner in which board members swear to uphold omerta as they are discreetly "made" like in Goodfellas. The school board must no longer be an exclusive club serving as the handmaiden of the administration and the tool of the Chesapeake Conference, but a legitimate entity unto itself that is openly and democratically selected with a commitment to directly engage the concerns of SAA students, teachers, and parents; and then also to serve as an effective representative check and balance on the SAA administration.
These changes actually don't begin at SAA, but at Spencerville Church which is the sole constituent church, and seats members on the Secret School Board. Eyes On SAA has written much about the school, but does the Secret School Board simply appoint itself? We think this is in effect largely true. Just like there are U.S. Senators and Congressional Representatives that stay in Washington literally for 4+ decades, and always end up chairing the high-profile committees, we have the equivalent of old politicians on SAA’s Secret School Board. However, functionally it all originates in the Spencerville Church. So perhaps we need to turn our gaze away from 2052 Spencerville Road for a moment, and give some attention to 16325 New Hampshire Avenue.
If there were a spoiled, defiant, petulant child throwing a tantrum in public, to whom would we first look as the primary parties responsible? The petulant child’s parents, of course. Similarly for an ornery, nasty, snarling dog, we first look to its owner. Or for a sports team notorious for playing dirty and intentionally injuring opposing teams, we would first look to the coach who trains and sends those thugs out onto the field. And if there is systemic patronage in SAA’s Secret School Board, a “deep state” of sorts, it has to go beyond mere complicity and enabling of Spencerville Church. Indeed it could only happen by the purposeful design and engineering of Spencerville Church. Not the rank and file Joe and Jane Haystack in the pew, who just dutifully raise their hand when the pastor speedily executes a vote on Sabbath morning to approve, let's say a new slate of board members. It could only be deliberate by the Spencerville Church leaders and power brokers. Logic leads us nowhere else.
“Now just wait a second, Lillian”, you may say, “Spencerville Church is neutral in member politics and above the stench of doling out privilege and preferential treatment.” Well, not so fast, dear reader. Take a moment to consider our analysis by clicking on Constituency Meeting or Couples Retreat? Spencerville Church leadership in that instance proved itself untrustworthy to tighten the basic nuts and bolts of democracy by sneakily nullifying its own church members' votes for delegates in the back church board room. For this anti-democratic phenomenon, we hold Spencerville Church leadership responsible (i.e., Pastor Stuart and the Church Board – reportedly stacked with his loyal friends and operatives). So, Pastor Stuart, and Spencerville Church Board - where did you find this anti-democratic model of voter nullification? The Jim Crow South? New York City's old Tammany Hall? Was it just “business as usual” passed down from a rich Spencerville anti-democratic tradition? Was it borrowed from the constituent churches of SDA academies like the ones listed above – who freely disclose the persons they send to their school boards? Or is there a well-worn template to dumb-down and manipulate the general population into sheepishly rubber-stamping whatever agenda the pastor and board devise? Well, that's a whole notha' movie, son - for another time, another place.
Now we will finally answer our own nagging question: Which scheme does SAA’s governance most closely resemble: Aristocracy? Oligarchy/Plutocracy? Cryptocracy? Monarchy? Feudalism? Representative Democracy?
Well, this is indeed a very hard choice to make, as SAA incorporates elements of all of the anti-democratic, elitist models of governance. Reasonable minds can disagree on this, but we at Eyes On SAA think the best answer is Aristocracy: “the rule of the best.”
If you could just accept that the school is run and ruled by those that are simply more important, more-privileged, and plainly better than you - like the first-class passengers on Titanic who got dibs on the lifeboats - then your life and mind will be more at ease whenever you think about SAA. It’s the metaphorical equivalent of swallowing the proverbial “blue pill” from Orpheus of The Matrix. We suspect that many in the SAA community are content to swallow the blue pill.
But if you are like us, and have trouble bowing the knee or kissing the rings of the haughty, uppity, secretive aristocrats on the Secret School Board, then downing the blue pill is even harder than swallowing an arbitrary and divisive vaccine passport mandate for your children. We at Eyes On SAA choose the “red pill”. If you do too, then it’s time to stop pretending that SAA is normal and regular in its governance. If it matters enough to you, then speak up and do something about it.
Here’s a suggestion: email a request to Mrs. Bowerman [tbowerman@spencerville.org] for a list of the SAA School Board’s members, its agendas, and minutes of its meetings from Fall 2019 to the present. Tell her we need transparency, accountability, and a Parent-Teacher Association. Send a duplicate request to Pastor Stuart [cstuart@spencervillechurch.org]. Post their response (or non-response) in the comment section.
Until change comes, it will just be one after another sun rising and setting on the Spencerville Adventist Aristocracy - ruled over in secret by the very best among us.
(Secret School Board Executive Committee, Spencerville Adventist Aristocracy)
Shining Light. Breaking Silence. Holding Accountable.
We’ve got Eyes On SAA.
-Lillian Hepburn-Richmond
(A Cohort of Concerned Parents)
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