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vised. The board chose the latter alternative, concocting elaborate procedures for preparing, sending and getting back homework assignments from students under suspension for disciplinary offenses. (Teachers! If your duties seem to grow and grow, don’t blame it all on state mandates, or the school board’s make-work obsession. Sometimes it originates closer to home!)
Now was everyone happy? Not by a long shot!
There was the problem of families where both parents worked outside the home and for whom even suspensions caused a problem — a problem which they attempted to shift onto the school system although this particular problem, per se, had nothing to do with the schools in law or tradition. How is the Suspended child going to be supervised while at home under suspension? By whom? Pressure from these people on the board was, somehow, to hold the “suspended” children in the schools or to make suspensions as infrequent and as short as possible. (Public schools had become babysitters by now, not just institutions to provide education.)
The board’s answer of sorts to this one was to form a standing committee (hitherto an absolute “no-no” in Rappahannock on the grounds that the school board could only act officially as a full board, by majority vote of the board, as a corporate body. Temporary committees, for specific and transient purposes such as construction of new buildings, insurance coverage, drafting of new school policies, etc., were constantly being formed to report back to the full board prior to action being taken. But a standing committee tends to become perpetual and, to some extent, tends to replace the full board in its arena of action, over time.)
This standing committee (called, alternatively, The Rappahannock County School Board Drug/Alcohol Committee or its Discipline Committee) consisted back in 1983 of Chairman Beverly Massie, one other board member, along with the superintendent, assistant superintendent, and the high school principal. Known today as the Administrative Discipline Committee it is still “standing,” to expedite hearings on drug offenses and other disciplinary cases (until the campaign promises of both Messrs. Bush and Dukakis are converted into federal mandates, to take the matter out of their hands!) Up until I left the board, the other three members received information memoranda from the assistant superintendent summarizing each discipline case and its disposition — after the fact.
I have before me three such information memos, received by me as one of the three “observer” members,
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