I am so disappointed with the School Board’s vote for the Weiming Dorm Project! The very fact that Dr. Skilling made money from this makes the entire project wrong. I didn’t move to this cute little ‘hometown feeling? town with concerts in the park to be forced to go global without even being asked how I felt about it or if it was something that I wanted.
This decision is going to impact and change our community forever. Dr. Skilling brought this project to us and made decisions for us and it will have a huge impact and then he’s leaving and won’t even have to live with it. I handed the Board a petition with 256 signatures and they took it and said thank you and then NEVER mentioned it again.
They never asked me any questions about it or tried to contact the people who signed it. Nothing! Here were people who were trying to speak up about their concerns with the Weiming Project and it meant nothing to the Board. For all I know it ended up in the wastebasket before we even left the building that night.
Tim Throne spent 10 minutes at the last school board meeting talking about the student engagement surveys that came out (for the strategic plan) but I want to know where the surveys about the Chinese dorm were?
Why wasn’t there a survey to see how the community felt about building a Chinese dorm in our community, when this is such an important decision that will affect a lot of things? Were they afraid that they wouldn’t receive the response they wanted? Have they done any research on what kind of impact adding 200 students to a school and community will have?
What are those kids with no cars going to do from 3-11 p.m. weekdays and on the weekends? All of this would be fine for a private school but NOT a community school. A community school is supposed to be made up of kids from the community, eight out of 13 kids, more than half of the kids on the basketball team are now School of Choice.
The most appalling thing I saw at the meeting was the response to Charlie Stevens questions and concerns that he had. They were met with irritated responses and labeled as criticisms when he just wanted to be informed. Dr. Skilling even said something under his breath and chuckled.
The Board themselves said that they are ‘plowing a path? and that this was all new so shouldn’t people be expected to have questions and concerns and shouldn’t they be allowed to ask them without hostility?
Charlie Stevens made very valuable points but was shut down immediately.
They even told him that there was a forum about the new contract two-weeks ago but I can assure you that not a single person I have asked knew anything about this forum. I have also looked back on their pages and there was no mention of it.
I also assume that the newspaper would have been on top of it as well. I wonder if the Board took into account the number of students who will move out of the district because they were not interested in going global. I guess if they had done a survey or received some community input they would have an idea.
Diane Meyers
Oxford