Editorial
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TweetThanks to Wayne Cowart and other church leaders who organized the community Thanksgiving celebration at Haines School.
A communitywide get-together to give thanks for our blessings is a credit to the involved churches, a bull’s-eye on the meaning of the holiday and a great opportunity for bringing together disparate elements of our community.
In a town full of seniors, singles and small families, why not pool our resources for Thanksgiving together, saving many people the drudgery of preparing the entire meal themselves? Here’s hoping Cowart’s idea endures and expands. Maybe next year, everyone could come back to the school on Black Friday for leftovers.
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Haines Borough school board members are making progress toward an open, public process for appointing members, but they’re not there yet.
In appointing two members to their own ranks Tuesday, board members made public statements supporting the actions they were about to take. That’s an improvement over previous board appointment votes, which came immediately after secret sessions, with little or no explanation to citizens.
But Tuesday’s board comments were brief and came only after a 20-minute, closed-door session where it appears some kind of consensus was reached. After the executive session, members spoke and voted in perfect uniformity, surprising considering that five board members each had to choose two new members from a roster of five applicants.
Alaska’s Open Meetings Act calls on local governmental bodies to conduct their business publicly. Like students tackling a math problem, school board and assembly members are expected by citizens to “show their work” when making decisions, expecially ones as weighty as choosing new members. When a student solving a long-division problem writes an answer on a test without showing how he arrived at it, a teacher becomes suspicious. Citizens respond similarly when leaders make decisions without revealing how they arrived at them.
school board members could learn something from their counterparts on the Haines Borough Assembly, who deliberate in public when appointing new members to their ranks. This process can be awkward and sometimes requires several rounds of voting. But it occurs in the open, and thus serves the public.
- Tom Morphet
