School Committee Chairwoman Ellen Alcorn (left) tangled again with Green board member Ben Meiklejohn. (photos/Portland School Department)
More discord and gridlock plague school board
Greens object to “bogus” committee assignments
By Chris Busby
Partisan angst flared again on the officially nonpartisan Portland School Committee during its Jan. 4 meeting.
Two registered Green Independent Party members, Ben Meiklejohn and Stephen Spring, objected to the subcommittee assignments made by Chairwoman Ellen Alcorn, a registered Democrat. The school board’s Finance, Policy and Legislative committees are all chaired by registered Democrats, and Democrats hold 2-1 majorities on the two most influential of those subcommittees, Finance and Policy.
“It’s clear to me this was done with some partisan intention,” Spring said during the meeting. “I think this list is quite bogus, frankly.”
Spring requested that the assignments be redone, but Alcorn gave no indication during the meeting that she would reconsider her decisions. She told Meiklejohn she would be willing to meet with him and discuss the rationale behind her choices.
No vote was taken on the committee assignments, but a motion introduced that evening to create a new subcommittee, a Personnel Committee, was voted on by the eight members present (Jason Toothaker, a registered Green, was not in attendance). That motion failed when the board deadlocked in a 4-4 vote.
The new committee would have been charged with reviewing negotiations between the board and school employee unions, as well as with evaluating the work of Superintendent Mary Jo O’Connor, before bringing its determinations to the full board for consideration.
District administrative staff brought the idea to the board, and Joline Hart, the district’s Director of Human Resources, spoke in favor of the measure. The board had a Personnel Committee in the 1990s, but subsequently dissolved it.
Board member Otis Thompson, a Democrat, joined the three Greens present in opposing the motion to recreate the subcommittee. The board’s handling of the superintendent’s salary exposed partisan tensions last month, and generated much ill will between members of different political parties. Thompson acknowledged this, but said, “I don’t think the solution is to form a subcommittee…. This is work the board should do [as a whole].”
Meiklejohn objected to the lack of detail contained in the motion to form the new subcommittee – the motion did not spell out the subcommittee’s duties or membership. He made a motion to refer the matter to the Policy Committee, but no member seconded that motion.
The school board’s Finance Committee is by far the most influential of the three subcommittees, followed by the Policy Committee. The Finance Committee does the lion’s share of work on the school budget, meeting with the City Council’s Finance Committee each spring to hammer out details before the budget goes to the full school board for approval, and then to the full council for a final vote.
The chairmanship of this subcommittee was voted on during a board caucus held last Nov. 30. Partisan discord over the super’s salary had erupted just prior to that caucus, during which Alcorn was selected, over Meiklejohn, to chair the board by a 5-4 vote that followed party lines. Thompson was selected to chair the Finance Committee over the other nominee, Spring, by the same 5-4 vote during that caucus.
Following the caucus, board members submitted committee requests to Alcorn, who chose the makeup of each subcommittee late last month and presented her choices at last night’s meeting.
Alcorn chose Spring (who served on the Finance Committee last year) and John Coyne, a registered Democrat elected to the board last November, to join Thompson on the Finance Committee this year.
Meiklejohn, who is serving his fifth year on the school board, was on the Finance Committee last year when it was chaired by Teri McRae, a Republican who lost her re-election bid last fall. He said it took him four years to get a seat on the influential subcommittee, and questioned why he was bumped off of it in favor of Coyne, a freshman board member (Meiklejohn did not mention Coyne by name).
Meiklejohn also pointed out that another first-year member, Democrat Lori Gramlich (who he likewise refrained from naming), was chosen to chair the Legislative Committee over a second-year board member who wanted that assignment. (That member is Toothaker, though Meiklejohn also did not mention him by name).
“I’ve never seen a first-year person be chair,” Meiklejohn said, adding that he’d been told in the past that committee assignments were made based on seniority of school board service.
Meiklejohn and Toothaker (a Legislative Committee member last year) were chosen to serve with Chairwoman Gramlich on that subcommittee. The Legislative Committee primarily meets with state legislators to discuss funding issues and education-related laws.
Gramlich, despite her freshman status on the school board, has extensive experience working with state lawmakers. She previously worked as the communications director for former State Senate President Beverly Daggett, and has been a lobbyist in Augusta for the Dirigo Alliance, a coalition of groups working for social and economic justice.
The Policy Committee has weighed several hot-button issues in recent years, most notably a policy change limiting military recruitment activities in Portland’s two public high schools. Spring, who chaired that subcommittee last year, will not serve on it this year. Alcorn chose Jonathan Radtke to chair the Policy Committee, and selected Gramlich and first-year Green Susan Hopkins to serve under Radtke.
