These words are from the mouth of (the now former) Secret School Board Chairperson, Mark Noble, in his attempt to silence a persistent questioner at last year’s (2022) annual SAA Constituency Meeeting (CM) and come to the rescue of a damsel in distress – Mrs. Bowerman.
And no, the CM is not a court trial – because those are described as a “search for the truth.” Of course the CM is not that. But it is a show for important information, plenty of propaganda and some trivia, with a fair amount of dancing and evading of the most important questions. What SAA has lacked for years is an actual open forum or dialogue for community members to ask questions of the administration about matters that are concerning without artificial time limits, one that doesn't start at 8:30 p.m., and without parliamentary tricks by the Chairperson to stifle questions. This was suggested years ago, and it only makes sense to do so. Yet it still hasn’t happened, so here we are at another CM.
The best way to prepare for the 2023 Constituency Meeting Show is to review what happened at the 2022 edition. We have already provided the delegate handouts for 2022, but we are also providing in this post the Delegate and Non-Delegate Questions & Answers. The 2022 CM was not nearly as controversial and contested as the 2021 CM – which was one for the ages. However we do tip our hat to one particular questioner noted below who was quite persistent in asking questions and seeking real answers. For the sake of keeping this post as short as possible, we will provide our full commentary on this dialogue in another post, but in the meantime we have inserted a few sneak previews in bold and italics.
As in years past, we identify by name the people who spoke out at the CM as it is a public forum, and questions are asked openly in the presence of all attendees. While we are not offering a verbatim transcript of the CM, we do seek to fairly and accurately reflect what was said there. If anyone whom we have quoted believes that they have been misquoted, then we will gladly receive their feedback and consider issuing a correction. So without further ado here is our report on the 2022 CM Q&A.
Delegate Questions & Answers:
Question by Ruth Satelmajer (Automatic Delegate (SAA (Formerly Secret) School Board Member): You need to brag a little more. In Hershey, PA, the band, the choir, and the orchestra all won “outstanding”?
Tissiana Bowerman (Head of School): Our students win everywhere.
[Comment: SAA has a phenomenal fine arts program, thanks to the work of Mr. Martinez, Mrs. Froelich, and the legendary Mrs. Jane Lanning. It’s almost unfair in competitions with other schools to have such an amazing team, but that’s not our problem! Thank you music department for everything you do for our children’s performing arts enrichment.]
Question by Christina Ramirez (Automatic Delegate – SAA Resource Teacher): How are AP courses weighted in GPA? In public schools they’re given more weight for GPA. What process establishes that? Why are they weighted the same as a regular class here at SAA?
Tissiana Bowerman: At many schools AP class grades artificially inflate GPAs. But colleges just flatten it back down again. It looks great in HS, but it makes no difference at the college level. It’s one of the first things I asked when I got here, and Dawn [Thompson] said after talking with registrars at the universities it’s easier to just leave it that way it is. Colleges look for AP classes in the application process since it shows you strived to go above and beyond, did you take one, and do you already have college credit. Personally I like our dual-enrollment courses better since they’re cheaper and give you a head start for college, and from the college’s perspective it shows they are overachievers, already have college credit, showing they can be successful at the college level, but either one works. They’re just looked at differently.
Christina Ramirez (follow-up question): Do you have any data about how students place in their AP Tests (3,4,5?). Do you track any of that?
Tissiana Bowerman: I do not have any of that tracked. I have seen some of the scores and talked with some teachers and how they are doing that, but I am not doing a full tracking process.
[Comment: Eyes On SAA received reports from a concerned parent who was unsatisfied with Mrs. Bowerman’s unresponsiveness to low-level scoring in AP classes. The parent sought information about test scores and questioned the effectiveness of the AP subject teacher, but was denied further information by school administration. By the way, why does SAA offer so few AP or dual-enrollment courses compared with so many other schools?]
Question by Sebrena Sawtell (Delegate by vote): SAA does better job than most other SDA schools with special education. Have you heard of any further training for teachers for kids with ADHD, dyslexia, and other conditions harder to identify. To know if it’s more possible to have more of our kids attend here than having to go to public schools. IEPs are respected here, whereas other places they do not. Is the Union or school looking for additional teacher training, which is required different teaching styles and ability to address special needs, and it’s often not part of SDA education.
Tissiana Bowerman: Often SDA schools don’t get involved with that at all due to lack of resources. SAA is unique in many ways, and some other larger schools are as well. We do not accept all IEPs. Christina is carrying that program all on her own, and she can’t have 100 students with that. So we look at that in the application process. Our priority is to meet student needs, and if we can’t then we will recommend something else for the student. Teacher training is available, the primary focus for conference/union has been DEI and new standards-based assessments, more than focus on that than special needs services or extra resources. Cristina does work with students here that are struggling and can give make recommendation and give information.
Mark Noble (Chairperson, SAA (Secret) School Board and Chairperson of 2022 SAA Constituency Meeting): Any other questions/comments?
[No further questions, thus ending delegate Q&A]
Non-Delegate Questions & (Non-)Answers
Mark Noble: Now is the time for questions or comments for Delegates and Non-Delegates, a time to have conversations.
Question 1 by Paul Rivera (Non-Delegate): I am following up from last year on a request from several parents and myself for there to be a policy of teacher neutrality in matters of controversy in political and social issues. Has there been progress on that?
Mark Noble: At SAA, our identity is a SDA, Christian School and we follow biblical interpretation. We don’t want political agendas from either side creeping into our teaching.
Tissiana Bowerman: The Chesapeake Conference provides the policy for its employees. We do converse in-house about our expectations from staff, like the textbooks and materials used and how information is presented. Our curriculum committee looked at this, and we have a multifaceted approach on how topics are discussed, not just a simple policy about political beliefs. So this is built-in from the Union and the Conference. I’ll check and get back.
Paul Rivera (question follow-up): None of things you have mentioned stopped last year’s Oluo book So You Want to Talk About Race from being brought into the classroom. Unfortunately I can report a situation at Highland View Academy (HVA) this year in which my son and others were subjected to a steady diet of the writings of Ibram X. Kendi, a modern-day prophet of Critical Race Theory (CRT). It’s very frustrating. The word I got from the HVA Principal was that it’s very clear that there should be neutrality. However there is still objectionable content coming into our schools. A policy of neutrality is not a hard thing to do. And it seems that the objectionable material is not going through curriculum reviews. I know that Montgomery County Public Schools are barraging their teachers and students with CRT and I’ve seen it repeatedly. It shouldn’t fall to parents to have to bring attention to this. We’re busy and have other things to do with our time.
Question 2 by Paul Rivera (Non-Delegate): One of the ways that we as parents can trust and verify is when schools put curriculum online. That was referred to last year. Has that been done yet?
Tissiana Bowerman: The textbook list and related information is available online at registration, plus course syllabi are also provided. We are also in the process of duplicating this online through our website. Jarrod [Lutz] sits on the English curriculum sub-committee. We broke our committees down into sub-committees to be able to focus.
Jarrod Lutz (Automatic Delegate – SAA Teacher): Your son is in one of my classes, so you would have gotten my syllabus at the beginning of the year. In Literature Committee, we scrapped 50% of our reading list for materials that might be even remotely controversial. What teachers do you think are teaching CRT? Not me, I’m not qualified, I'm not a law professor, I don’t understand the full gamut of CRT, and couldn’t if I tried. The teacher involved last year has moved down to the Middle School level, so I’m the only real English teacher in the High School. We eliminated 50% of our book list that worked well and was taught well for the past 10 years. What more could I have done to address these perceptions, which I call misperceptions? Are there still issues in my department – which now is just me?
[Comment: Reader, be very, very suspicious of any accomplished and intelligent teacher, like Mr. Jarrod Lutz, telling you “I don’t know what CRT is, I’m no law professor.” That’s a classic talking point obfuscation straight from stealth CRT advocates. It’s gaslighting, or in this case, “Gas-Lutzing”. We’ll cover this issue in more depth in another post. By the way, what in the devil was being taught before that a whopping FIFTY PERCENT of the content had to scrapped? Was 50% of the content also neo-Marxist, far left-leaning propaganda? It must have been wokeness on steroids. In the meantime, here are some resources that reveal how widespread CRT truly is:
Paul Rivera (question follow-up): I don’t know of any issues this year, I was talking about HVA.
Jarrod Lutz: Kendi is not the creator of CRT, though yes he writes about racial justice. The issue you refer to is an issue with my wife, who has responded to your emails and we – she has worked with you. We love you and your family. No one in my family is trying to teach anything to push kids out of school or away from the Lord. We teach nothing but Christian principles, and we don’t apply them politically - for sure socially - but those things are often different. My wife’s classes at HVA, and this is not about HVA, is Jesus first and Jesus always. She has worked with Janesta in response to your emails and with you as well. We love you and your kids and you guys, and don’t seek to edge you out, or any family out, or push your kids away from you with politics.
Paul Rivera (question follow-up): Thank you, I appreciate that, and my son loves your class. I am only mentioning HVA as a warning or FYI.
Question 3 by Paul Rivera (Non-Delegate): Is the Family Directory no longer available to us?
Tissiana Bowerman: We took down the Family Directory because we had different parents using it to send out information that would not typically fall under correct communication or healthy communication. So we reviewed the policy. I was getting emails from parents complaining about emails from a variety of different parents on different topics. Se we closed that down after the 3rd or 4th complaint on a topic or email chain. We’re working on a policy internally before we reactivate it. But any one of our teachers will be happy to share info to reach out specifically to a class. So if you have a teacher, ask them to send the message out to the class.
Paul Rivera (question follow-up): That’s something that should be discussed with us as parents. 4 complaints out of 400 students is pretty infinitesimal.
Tissiana Bowerman: It was 4 different chains of multiple complaints. I reviewed this issue with heads of a couple of other or our larger schools, and they do not leave their directory open. The Columbia Union wanted to know why we opened it in the first place. I actually tried to shut it down in the first week or 2 of my first year here, because it’s not normal protocol. I was told by the administration team, including Brittany Thorp and some teachers, that we’d never had problems with it, that everyone had always used it respectfully, so we left it as it was. So then we decided to just shut it down after the 3rd-4th complaint so that we wouldn’t have repeated problems while we work on a policy.
Paul Rivera (question follow-up): It’s a tradition that we’ve appreciated, and we’ve used it over the years to reach out to my son’s classmates.
Tissiana Bowerman: It’s a nice thing to have that. There’s a feature to withdraw from it if you don’t want to share your information. But that requires training to show others how to do it correctly. Until we have that we shut it down.
Paul Rivera (question follow-up): There already is an opt-out for parents. Doesn’t that solve the problem?
Tissiana Bowerman: As long as people are aware of it and know how to use it. So that ties back into training. What are the features and our expectations of use. As soon as we finish that, we will probably reactivate it.
[Yes, obviously an opt-out completely solves the problem of anyone not wanting to be in the family directory. Take note that Mrs. Bowerman’s own words confirm that she sought to eliminate the online family directory in her first week after arriving at SAA. Forget the fact that it has been a SAA tradition for well over a decade by encouraging communication and relationships with in the SAA community. Mrs. Bowerman arrives and immediately knows better than everyone else? By her own admission, she had to be held back by the rest of the SAA administration team (i.e., Mrs. Rosa). Beware of leaders who ignore tradition and nullify the wishes and consent of hundreds of families just to implement her own tight-fisted control over this school. How dense does Mrs. Bowerman think parents are to need training to understand how to check an opt-out box during registration? More analysis to come. Meanwhile, check out our post CONFISCATED: Our SAA Family Directory]
Paul Rivera (question follow-up): My last question is….
Mark Noble: Hey Paul, that was 3, I’m sorry, but I want to see if anyone else has questions. I don’t want to short-circuit your list of questions, but in the interest of time and everyone else’s interests, maybe you could present your questions one-on-one or as a group, but without the whole group here being present.
[Translation: You’re not being affirming enough, and so your questions must stop now.]
Paul Rivera (question follow-up): Please indulge me on this because it is a question of great concern to the school family.
Question 4 by Paul Rivera (Non-Delegate): I heard there was a staff member that slapped around some kids or a kid. Did that happen?
Tissiana Bowerman: That’s a personnel issue that I will never discuss with the community. What you heard I would not speak to with anyone not in the chain of personnel. Anything that happens on this campus is taken to Mrs. Walker, conversations are had and protocol is followed the way we’re expected to handle them. But I’m not going to go into any detail.
[Comment: We call B.S. on you, Mrs. Bowerman. Actually, it is very much a child safety issue as we argued in our original post: REPORT: SAA Teacher Assaulted 2 Students. Mrs. Bowerman, why don’t you answer the questions by saying “no, it didn’t happen, that was just a rumor.” Or, “We have investigated this accusation and found that an assault of a child did in fact happen by a staff member, so we reported it to the authorities as a case of possible child abuse, and we have disciplined the teacher by suspension or termination.” You apparently had no problem immediately terminating Judie Rosa in 2021 for an unapproved email, right? In one simple online search, we found dozens of examples of reported school assaults of children by staff members, we have listed just 8 of them below. Did those schools waive the personnel flag and fail to inform their communities like SAA has? Hell no, they did not. In every single one of those cases, school administration gave a statement to the school community – every last one. So reader, do not swallow the B.S. line fed to you by Mrs. Bowerman and SAA that this is nothing more than a confidential personnel matter. Either a child was assaulted by a staff member, or there wasn’t. Either that staff member is still at SAA or not. We know which teacher was accused and we may choose to reveal that name on our blog. But know this, SAA’s head of school clearly lacks the courage and conviction to properly protect SAA – now that indeed is a personnel issue.
Paul Rivera (question follow-up): How do I know my sons are safe from someone that is slapping kids around here? My kids don’t always share with me what happens at school.
Tissiana Bowerman: When you enroll your students here, you are trusting the organization and institution. Either you trust the people you’re working with and you have the conversations with them, or you don’t and you have to make the choice for your family as to whether you do or you don’t. But we do follow protocol and work with the conference and do so for all personnel issues.
Paul Rivera (question follow-up): Is this type of behavior tolerated by this school?
Mark Noble: OK, we’re going to go ahead. There is no activity that would put a student in harm that would be tolerated. We have guidelines we have protocols, the union and conference are there to make sure that we follow those. Going down this avenue at this is point is, well if you want to have a conversation with us directly, then that is fine.
Paul Rivera (question follow-up): These things need to be discussed openly so parents know what is going on. It wasn’t my kid. If it was my kid, that would have been a different situation, believe me.
Mark Noble: This is not a courtroom setting. This is not a trial. This is a constituency meeting. We are trying to work through this process. And I understand what you’re trying to do with your list of questions. There’s someone that has a comment behind you, so would you let Alyssa come to the microphone at this point?
Paul Rivera (question follow-up): Sure, but these things need to be spoken about openly, not simply one-on-one. It wasn’t my child who was harmed. If it had been, then I would talk to school administrators directly. But I hear that and it disturbs me. We do trust our children to the school, and that is not something you should take for granted.
Mark Noble: It is not taken for granted, you have no reason to fear for the harm of your children by any stretch of the imagination. I’m going to ask if Alyssa can step to the microphone please.
Paul Rivera (question follow-up): Let’s talk about things openly. Let’s have more open meetings, please.
Alyssa Truman (Non-Delegate) Comment: I just want to say that I also heard this report or rumor. I think your question was actually answered. They cannot address it. They cannot address personnel issues. I just want to say as a parent, thank you, I trust that each and every one of you in this building is looking out for the best of our children, and that if something were to happen, you would deal with that person and they would be fired. So thank you for taking care of our children.
Bob Burrow (Automatic Delegate, SAA Secret School Board Member): There is a misinformed idea of transparency in our institutions. Transparency doesn’t mean that everything is spoken of publicly. There are things that are not spoken of publicly, because they involve other people other than ourselves. They can be spoken of in private, even multiple times in private. Personnel issues are probably at the top of that list. So I think it is appropriate for parents with concerns about your child to talk to administration, not about personnel issues at a constituency meeting, or board meeting, or in church, or wherever. Here’s an example I have used: Where do you work, Walt?
Walt Fennel (Automatic Delegate, SAA Secret School Board Member): Ernst & Young
Bob Burrow (follow-up) If someone has a problem in Ernst & Young is an announcement made to the whole staff?
Walt Fennel: No
Bob Burrow (follow-up): Okay. It’s no different here. Enough from me, we can all go home now.
[Comment: Bob Burrow, self-proclaimed transparency-hater [see 2021 CM Main Event: Q&A, Part 2 ] also thinks everyone around him is dense too. Instead of lobbing Walt a beachball-sized no-brainer question, why not ask the better and more appropriate one: “Hey Walt, if an employee at Ernst & Young was going around physically or sexually assaulting customers or fellow employees, would management give a warning? Or would they hide it and say nothing so that the next unsuspecting person could become a victim, then turn around and slap the company with a lawsuit and generate a huge scandal? Hey Bob, have you ever heard of
a certain NFL owner named Daniel Snyder and the hostile workplace he created? Or how about the Roman Catholic Church's child sexual abuse scandal? Were those just strictly personnel matters too? Well, that's what happens when management protects predators rather than hold them to account. Is SAA shielding a child abuser too? More to come...]
Ken Kline (Delegate by vote) Question: I have a question about the vaccine requirement for overnight trips. Will that be looked at or changed?
Tissiana Bowerman: Yes we had already taken off the last field trip that came up. We pulled that policy once we didn’t need extra supervision under COVID travel guidelines. We had the board vote it, and we pulled it.
Ken Kline (follow-up question): Including for overnight trips?
Tissiana Bowerman: Mm-hm.
Unknown Person: What about the Potomac Valley Athletic Conference vaccine requirement?
Tissiana Bowerman: It is out of our control, but I believe and hope that they will be pulling
back on that.
Mark Noble: Any other questions or comments? I don’t see any.
[No further questions, thus ending Non-Delegate Q&A]
As referenced, we will be adding more commentary in a subsequent post. In the meantime, we acknowledge Non-Delegate Paul Rivera for asking hard questions and pushing for real answers. There were still many other questions left unasked and unanswered, or evaded and dodged. This once again brings up the importance of SAA holding an open forum, town-hall meeting for parents and other community members to have Q & A - without artificial time limits, that begins earlier than 8:30 p.m., and without the Chairperson's parliamentary tricks to stifle questions. The Constituency Meeting is an inadequate forum, but it seemingly is all there is for the time being. The community has been asking for a town hall for years, particularly the symbolic 144,000 signers of the Let Judie Finish Petition back in 2021. Will SAA ever allow that to happen?
Meanwhile, we agree with the now former Secret School Board Chairperson, Mark Noble who said to his "pain-in-the-rear" questioner, Mr. Rivera: “This is not a courtroom setting. This is not a trial.”
That’s exactly right, Mr. Noble – it’s not a courtroom, and it’s not a trial. It is a show.
-Lillian Hepburn-Richmond
(A Cohort of Concerned Parents)
Shining Light. Breaking Silence. Holding Accountable.
We’ve got Eyes On SAA.
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