When Schools Fail to Act Ethically:
The Vital Role of Civic Journalism
by
Janis Teruggi Page, Ph.D. Student
Missouri School of Journalism
University of Missouri, Columbia
2774 E. Main St., #178
St. Charles, IL 60174
USA
(630) 584-0809
[log in to unmask]
Accepted for presentation by the Civic Journalism Interest Group
Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
Kansas City, MO
July 30 - August 2, 2003
AV Request: Overhead projector
When Schools Fail to Act Ethically:
The Vital Role of Civic Journalism
Abstract
In summer 2001, a small town in Illinois experienced an incomprehensible
series of traumas, thrust into the center of a national crisis involving
toxic mold contamination, an infected school, and an intractable school
board. Assertive coverage by the local press not only provided substantial
investigative reporting, but gave voice to an oppressed public. Written
from personal experience, this research narrative documents the vital role
of civic journalism in promoting good citizenship when public servants fail.
Introduction
In the summer of 2001, a small town in Illinois found itself in the midst
of an incomprehensible series of traumas, thrust into the center of a
national crisis involving toxic mold contamination, an infected school, and
an intractable school board. Assertive coverage by the local press not only
provided substantial investigative reporting, but also gave voice to an
oppressed public. As a parent of middle and high school-age children in
this community, and as a graduate student myself, I became personally
involved with this micro-tragedy from two perspectives, as a victim and as
an ethics critic. Due to my observation and participation, I experienced
the vital role of civic journalism in a typical American town and its
ability to promote good citizenship when public servants fail to serve
democratically through ethically questionable conduct.
In this critical essay, I will detail one school district's experience with
its officials, the community discordance and victimization that resulted
from school board actions and decisions, and the facilitating role played
by the local press in empowering a minority and enriching participation in
the public sphere.1. My intent is to take ethical perspectives to evaluate
the communication policies of the school board that effectively neutralized
its constituency's voice during a time of crisis. My aim is to then
document how involvement by the local press provided a voice for the
repressed and a catalyst for change. First, I will review the literature on
civic journalism. I will then highlight the circumstances that led to the
school crisis in summer 2001. Next, I will review the official standards
the school board is obligated to follow. I will then assess specific
instances and rhetoric where the board failed to uphold these standards
with morally questionable conduct, language, and decision making. Within
this timeline, I will identify three significant windows of illumination,
when local press coverage effectively served the community to stimulate
deliberation, build understanding, and give voice to alternative
viewpoints, and as a consequence helped to lead its community through this
period of crisis.
Literature Review
Civic Journalism
Since 1990 when the first acknowledged exercise of planned public
journalism appeared in the Wichita Eagle (Merritt and Rosen 54), local
newspapers across the nation have embraced this journalistic
responsibility. Merritt's achievement at the Eagle was to aggressively
report the 1990 campaign with in-depth treatment of issues, resulting in
campaign coverage reform. Lambeth has since defined public journalism as
journalism that listens to the stories and ideas of citizens and that
provides alternative frames on important community issues, frames that
stimulate citizen deliberation and build public understanding of issues. It
also advances public knowledge of solutions and values served by
alternative courses of action (Lambeth 17). In this sense, the two daily
local newspapers in this essay, The Daily Herald and the Kane County
Chronicle, both "approached daily reality from the perspective of (their)
readers" (Greider qtd in Lambeth 29). In doing so, they helped to
stimulate and raise the quality of public deliberation by engaging in a
forum in print that filled in for the absent public forum, denied to the
community by the school board.
Local press and local issues play a significant role in establishing
community integration, as cited by McLeod et al in their 1996 research.
Community integration is another way of saying personal identification and
involvement within a community, or good citizenship. "A basic tenet of
democratic political theory is that a just and healthy society depends on
the informed participation of its citizenry," notes McLeod et al (189). In
another study, Friedland and McLeod maintained that local media "stimulate
the flow of information through personal networks and thereby encourage
both group discussion and individual reflection," (qtd in Mastin 116). In
the case of St. Charles, not only did local reporters facilitate community
response, likewise did newspaper management. Kane County Chronicle
publisher Roger Coleman, through his consistent participation in meetings
and events surrounding the school crisis, virtually modeled good
citizenship within the community.
Public Education System
Inherent in the public school system throughout the United States is
regulation by a local
school board within each school district. In her essay, "The Changing Role
of School Boards," Ellen Todras states that school boards, as the
traditional linchpins of American educational governance, are encountering
criticism from the very populations they attempt to represent. This censure
is a nationwide trend, with state governments, superintendents, community
members and parents experiencing a frustration with school boards that has
reached crisis proportions. District size appears to be a significant
factor: the areas most impacted are large urban and rural/suburban
districts. Various academicians and educational policy institutes concur
that the "greatest problem facing both rural and urban school boards is
their tendency to micro-manage and become bogged down in minutiae" (Todras).
The National School Boards Association has deflected attacks on their
performance, calling themselves scapegoats and stressing the inherent
"all-American" fairness of their structure and role in representative
governance (Todras). The Illinois School Board Association warns its rookie
board members, "During the past four or five decades, prophets have arisen
who declared that school boards were not competent to run the schools of a
modern complex society," but then declares, "prophets come and go, but the
school board remains" (Illinois Association of School Boards). Given my
personal experience with a severe sick school crisis, exacerbated by a
recalcitrant board, these words struck me. Could this self-important
posturing by the boards' state leadership, as suggested by the preceding
comments, impart or reflect a similar attitude within its membership? Are
local school boards influenced to behave in a privileged manner,
unreceptive to constructive criticism? Has the school board system of
governance become a democratically-constipated body whose intent and
conduct prohibits community input and consensus? It was with these
questions and their ethical implications that I engaged in this inspection
of the events occurring in summer 2001.
Background
St. Charles East High School is one of two high schools in sprawling
Community Unit School District 303, located in Kane County, Illinois, on
the far western edge of suburban Chicago. The town of St. Charles,
scenically situated on the winding Fox River, has only approximately 28,000
residents, but its school district serves more than 50,000 due to
incorporation of bordering rural areas. The high school is renowned
statewide as an athletic powerhouse, setting a record in 1999 with seven
state championships. Yet in March of 2001, as the 2,500 East students
streamed out of their buildings to begin a one-week spring break, a crisis
began to unfold. During that week, the school administration authorized an
independent firm to conduct a thorough indoor environmental evaluation in
response to persistent air quality complaints by staff members and parents,
and a pending student lawsuit. What they found prompted the regional
superintendent to close the school immediately and indefinitely and lead to
a period of questionable ethics in the conduct and decision-making of the
school board, resulting in widespread community trauma and a conscientious
response from the local press.
As early as 1988, parents and staff members began complaining about the air
quality within the school. For thirteen years the complaints grew in
number and severity. And while the administrators and school board
addressed many of the complaints with private and public environmental
inspections, including the Illinois Department of Public Health and NIOSH,
the inspectors' recommendations were insufficiently followed. Report after
report ended with the same basic conclusions: increase outside air intake,
remove water-damaged materials, find the water source that is causing mold
and stop it (Meltzer).
A 1998 state report showed only modest improvement in the school's air
quality and urged the district to investigate problem areas within the
buildings. Also in 1998, a citizens' air-quality task force was developed
to monitor the school's decisions; a building foreman was hired, to be
replaced twice within two years; and various repairs and new inspections
were conducted (Meltzer).
Finally, in March 2001, the board hired the firm of AAA Environmental to
conduct further tests. AAA's investigation revealed the presence of toxic
molds, aspergillus and stachybotrys, inside the walls of classrooms.
Stachybotrys is a dark-colored fungi that thrives on water-damaged
materials such as sheet rock, paper, ceiling tiles, insulation backing and
wallpaper, and produces extremely toxic mycotoxins. Aspergillus flavus,
which affects people with compromised immune systems, was found in several
locations. It produces a mycotoxin, Aflotoxin B, that "is one of the most
potent carcinogens known" (Aerotech). AAA recommended the school remain
closed for an additional week for a more thorough examination. When the
district superintendent, Francis Kostel, resisted this extension, the
regional superintendent overruled his decision and officially closed the
entire facility, which meant his approval would be required for reopening.
It also meant that now all policy and operations decisions rested on the
school board.
St. Charles East is one of two high schools in District 303. Its
facilities were built in stages between 1973 and 1976, a time when energy
conservation encouraged limited windows and tightly constructed buildings.
Due to severe overcrowding and the projection of even faster future growth
in the rural western section of the district, voters approved a referendum
in 2000 to convert a newly-built middle school into a second high school,
St. Charles North. It is a state-of-the-art facility, built to mirror, and
at times exceed, the East side school academically, technologically, and
athletically. It draws almost exclusively from neighborhoods with high
home values, whereas the few low-income neighborhoods in the district all
attend the East school. As is typical with new high schools, only freshmen
and sophomores attended North's first year of operation, 2000-01; the
following year it expanded to include juniors. Thus, when the East school
was shut down due to mold contamination, the North school was running at
only 60% capacity (C.U.S.D. 303).
The Crisis Situation
The preceding introduction to the East and North schools figures
prominently into the immediate fate of the East students, and to the
volatile school board sessions of summer 2001 which pitted the two school
communities against each other and corralled the local press as mediator.
In the weeks following East's closure, the school board forbade any
entrance to the buildings, even to retrieve textbooks, backpacks, musical
instruments, teaching plans, computer records, or gradebooks. Signs on all
entrances read, "Warning: Unsafe Facility, Do Not Enter, Building Closed."
Only AAA technicians, fully cloaked in white bio-hazard suits, entered the
buildings to conduct experiments within each classroom. Network television
remotes filmed them constantly, students eyed them with fascination, and we
watched them and worried. From various media, we learned of the growing
number of "sick" buildings and schools throughout the United States, and we
realized that our hometown was now on that map.
Towards the end of the third week, anxiety had deeply set its roots within
the community. Would our children suffer any serious, long-term health
effects? Of immediate concern, when would the students return to school,
and where? My freshman son Benjamin needed a solid first-year foundation.
My daughter Johanna, a junior, faced the most critical time for college
exams and any necessary G.P.A. resuscitation. And many of the students had
already easily slipped into summer mode. The final solution came only days
before it was put into place. The school board voted to relocate all
students and teachers to the North high school. Classes resumed in early
April, the third week of school closure for the East students. On a split
morning/afternoon schedule, the two schools shared the facility, providing
each student body with four hours of instruction time daily (Fabre). This
disruption provoked animosity and bitterness in the host North school. Many
of the East students and faculty were made to feel unwelcome. Demeaning
language addressed the visitors. Supplies and chairs disappeared on a daily
basis. A community that shared a single identity just two years' earlier
was now split into two adversarial sides.
In June, AAA's final report on the shuttered East school was presented to
the community
and it was damning: The firm uncovered high mold growth behind walls and
within ceilings, underneath floors, and in upholstered chairs throughout
the campus' buildings. AAA also diagnosed lead in the drinking water, and
bacteria and endotoxins in the spray-applied fireproofing that, through age
and neglect, had been allowed to disperse through the ventilation system,
coated with mold and bacterial colonies. It was obvious that many of the
repairs prescribed throughout the years were done only halfway or not at
all. In science rooms, microscopes were covered with fuzzy white mold due
to neglected water damage. On ceilings, tiles were discovered to have been
painted over to cover water stains, and the leaks were never repaired. The
list of problems was extensive, and AAA made explicit recommendations on
remediation (Meltzer). The small group of watchdog citizens and staff
members who had lobbied on behalf of the school's air quality for years
finally felt some vindication. As a parent of two children attending the
school, I was horrified that the community had been lied to by its
"care-givers."
The first window: Press reports from the frontline.
In a move unauthorized and unsupported by district officials, the regional
superintendent exercised the test of publicity by inviting a handful of
citizens, including a single member of the press, for a personal tour of
the shuttered school building. The following day, the cover story by this
prominent columnist from the Daily Herald effectively turned around
community and local press sentiment. Stunned at the severity of the
situation, the columnist, who had been an outspoken supporter of the
district, now detailed a "long, sad list of what's wrong at St. Charles
East" (Page 2.). His report acted as a catalyst to increase watchdog
involvement and activism among citizens, and also prompted competing
reporters to join together in supportive collaboration over the months
ahead to get the facts and tell the stories.
Kane County Chronicle publisher Roger Coleman told me, "…we gave (our
reporters) a great deal of latitude in pursuing every side of the story,
and even pushed them to, but we did not encourage them to take a side or
become part of the story. That said, reporters are intelligent human beings
and are supposed to be able to 'sniff out' a story. If they are good at
this, then they are also going to be able to 'sniff out' where a story
'smells'. When this happens they are going to take that route and look for
facts where somebody is probably trying to hide some of them. Now they are
no longer just 'covering the story' but are passionately involved in trying
to contribute to the common good of the community…thus entering into civic
journalism. That's what makes the job rewarding!"
Page detailed the dirt-clogged air filters, varnished-over molded wood,
broken sinks with constantly running water, standing water under kitchen
floors, and loose duct-work in the Macintosh lab which allowed force of air
to loosen and spray mold-covered insulation particles throughout the lab
and library. In the newly-opened walls, he observed insulation that was
installed backwards and even areas filled with construction trash—wrappers,
wood pieces, floor sweepings—substituted when the builders apparently ran
out of insulation years ago. There had been no project manager from the
district who oversaw construction.
By June, a second student lawsuit and a class action suit were filed.
The crisis situation
was well underway, and reflection on failure to uphold past
responsibilities was not yet publicly addressed: Everyone realized that
crucial decisions must be made relatively quickly. However, it was common
knowledge the school board had been the decision-maker on much of the
previous work. They failed in their direct role by contributing to the
circumstance, "something they (did had) contributed to the need for care,"
and this was their responsibility (Tronto, 132).
It was with this distressful management history and damaged community
confidence in its leaders that a series of emergency school board meetings
were held mid-summer to decide the fate of the district's school buildings
and how to accommodate the students in the fall. At this point, it is
important to clarify the ruling hierarchy. The school board is the top of
the educational power pyramid. Local school board control goes back to our
country's early pilgrim school houses. The board is comprised of seven
citizens who are publicly elected for four-year terms. There are no
qualifications. Once elected, they hire or rehire the district
superintendent, all administrators, teachers, and staff, and oversee their
policies and performance in all school district matters including
expenditures. For such a critical responsibility to assure the quality
education of a community's children, the Illinois Association of School
Boards has adopted a 12-point Code of Conduct. Two points in particular
will be challenged in the remainder of this essay: First, the board members
shall represent all school district constituents honestly and equally and
refuse to surrender their responsibilities to special interest groups.
Second, board members should encourage and respect the free expression of
opinion of fellow board members and others who seek a hearing before the
board (Illinois Association of School Boards). Rather than adhere to these
standards, I will illustrate that they asserted a group privilege for
discussions and decision-making regardless of counter opinion. Stanley
Aronowitz captures the champion/victim relationship they created: "those at
the pinnacle are able to impose a logic of domination on the rest...by
simply repeating their falsehoods through every avenue of public debate and
discourse" (Aronowitz 5).
The individual who headed East high school as principal throughout most of
its years of neglect, Francis Kostel, was now the district superintendent.
As mandated, he sat alongside the board at all meetings, wielding influence
with this body empowered to solve the current crisis.
Relatively few administrators have been trained to deal with conflicts
(Beck and Murphy), and Kostel, along with the board, proved to be no
exceptions. Their undemocratic use of power was painfully evident, despite
the fact that ethics experts caution leaders to use their power with
restraint, since it always holds the potential for treating others as less
than human (Lashway).
In response to the AAA report, one of the first actions Kostel and the
board took was to position a team of paid experts to review the document
and report on its accuracy. The board's decade-long habit of overlooking
study results, or insufficiently addressing them, now manifested itself
with attempts to destroy the credibility of AAA, the entity that had
finally won the community's trust. More problematic, James Woods, one of
the paid experts hired by the board to refute the AAA report, had already
been hired to help defend the district against the two class-action
lawsuits. The Daily Herald devoted a prominent editorial, "Don't Kill
School Messenger," to voicing community concerns over this public
diminishment of AAA's findings.
Thus began a series of emergency board meetings, and what appeared to be a
systematic evasion and belittlement of community voice and opposition. In
accordance with the Illinois Open Meetings Act, the public must have access
to all board meetings when three or more members are together discussing
school matters, and the customary format allowed for the public to make
comments only at the end of the meeting, with each speaker receiving a time
limitation. During many of these emergency summer meetings, the board
members held lengthy dialogues and presentations among themselves, often
running for three hours and exhausting the patience and ability of many
audience members to remain late into the weekday nights for the public
comment portion. Considering the basic values of representative democracy,
here ethics are suspect in that the audience participants were not enjoying
access to channels of public communication, nor the ability to present
alternatives (Johannesen 23). To present their concerns, East teachers sat
in the rear of meetings with poster-sized "index cards" asking questions
that were not being asked, or answered, in the body of the meeting. These
signs read, "Why change 'experts' in midstream?" and "Where's the
(citizens') Task Force?" The Kane County Chronicle documented the saga of
the unheard by reprinting photographs of these signs over a period of two
months (Walter, "Emotions erupt" and "AAA report attacked"). Coleman
describes his paper's coverage, "We were able to give a louder voice to the
perceived 'trouble-makers' that had been ignored for so many years,
allowing the problem to persist and grow…We wanted the oppressed and
'little people' to have their story be told. (Our photographs) showed the
community the people who were passionate in this particular struggle as
well as what (and who) they believed to be the real problems."
Indeed, while the school board meetings appeared to offer face-to-face
communication and an opportunity for open discourse between citizens and
policy makers, there often was not genuine communication. According to
Jurgen Habermas' discourse ethic, speech should be appropriate, suitable to
and reflective of the generalizable interests of the participants" (Cooper
32). What was allowed to be spoken reflected agreement with the
administration. The audience of citizens, many of whom had come to be heard
(or to hear an alternative viewpoint), became paralyzed participants,
effectively diminished by disregard. Of Habermas' four constituent elements
of the "ideal speech situation," at least two were neglected in this
situation: audience members were not granted equal opportunity to initiate
communicative acts, and they were denied equal opportunity to present
arguments (Johannesen 45). Each person wishing to speak was required to
sign up at the beginning of the meeting, and at the very end, the board
president granted more time for some than others, depending on their point
of view. The president would not allow those further down on the list to
concede their time to the cut-off speaker, and occasionally deliberately
bypassed names. According to Habermas, these public discussions are
illegitimate because they "rely on power or privilege or on the suppression
of the discourse" (Van Hooft qtd. in Cooper 33). When publicly criticized,
the board claimed their public comments time slot fulfilled their
obligation. This posturing to appear to provide a true community forum was
a deceit. Alison Brown describes "dissembling" as a putting on a false
front when in reality one is ignoring or shutting down possible avenues of
knowledge. "...To willfully disregard a body of thought is much worse than
to be merely ignorant of it. It becomes worse because it violates what many
have seen as a primary moral obligation" (Brown 51).
The second window: Reporters tutor history and science.
The district continued to further deny community, teacher, and staff
involvement. "St. Charles East mold task force excludes teachers," the
Chicago Tribune reported on June 8:
Officials for St. Charles District 303 turned down a request from the
Illinois Education Association to have a representative monitor
conversations among
experts trying to decide the best way to fight mold and other environmental
problems at (the school) ... a negotiator for the Association said earlier
that teachers and staff need reassurance. "They have proven that what was
done over the last 13 years was not adequate," he said. "The question is,
'What will happen this time and why should this be any different?' But if
we hear the debate, it will mean that people will (understand) and feel
safe"... School officials said it would not be practical to include
non-scientists in discussions ... "It does not make sense to have someone
who is not a scientist sit and watch what's happening on that panel," said
board member Sandra Wright.
Ethical theorist De George offers, "The claim might be made that the
subject is technical and best left to the technicians, but ... any choice
of levels involves value judgments and there is little reason to assume
that technicians represent or hold the same values as even the majority ...
As rational agents, people have a right to decide issues that directly
concern and affect them" (185). It seems like common sense, but power does
strange things to rational thinking. As Michel Foucault theorizes, the
excesses of power produce harmful effects. Lorraine Code, influenced by
Foucault, states, "... there is power inherent in knowledge, a power that
can be exercised over those who do not know...in totalitarian societies
(it's called) controlled ignorance" (Cooper 36). By guarding their
knowledge from the citizens, the ruling body of school board members and
administrators are effectively rendering them powerless. For just as
people have a right not to be harmed, they have a right to know when they
are being put at risk of harm (De George 182). And the level of acceptable
risk should be determined by an informed public through the process of
inclusion. A distanced public, wrongfully separated from something to which
they should be united, is alienated (De George 140) and psychologically
wounded. Sissela Bok's perspective of the deceived can help explain the
feelings of those teachers: "... those who have been lied to in an
important matter...are resentful, disappointed, and suspicious. They feel
wronged; they are wary of new overtures" (20).
As a counter force to this alienation and deceit, the local press provided
the inclusion not offered by the district through acknowledging community
concerns and educating with information. The Daily Herald observed, "When
AAA Environmental found potentially dangerous mold in some classrooms at
St. Charles East…it was the first time many parents ever had heard of
problems (although) five groups had examined the school before AAA came to
town." I was one of those parents, blissfully naïve because the school so
prominently promoted its academic and athletic stature. The Daily Herald
compiled a 28-year timeline of the school's history of construction, health
complaints, inspections, repair efforts, and ignored recommendations. The
paper also explained all the mold terminology (Meltzer). The health
complaints began in 1988 identifying asthma problems, and then progressed
to headaches, dizziness, fainting, bloody noses, immune system disorders
and cancers. As far back as 1994, the school was evacuated due to poor air
quality and 31 students and staff members were hospitalized with reactions.
In 1998, an article on sick schools in Good Housekeeping magazine featured
St. Charles East students and teachers (Brooks). What at first seemed
difficult to believe, that my children's school was dangerous and its
leadership deceitful, now became a grim reality. We turned to the two local
newspapers habitually each morning with respect for what we considered the
truth: testimony from our parent activists and our teachers, and full
coverage of all sides by dedicated young reporters. "We stimulated
deliberation and built greater understanding by our persistent attempts to
find out everything that was happening beneath the surface (no pun
intended)," states Coleman. " I think we helped get both sides of the issue
in front of our readers, but most importantly, I believe that we were able
to uncover many things that the school district tried to hide."
Soon afterwards, Pamela Smith, AAA President, revealed that during the
initial testing in
March, school maintenance crews were cleaning ahead of them, scrubbing
floors and painting walls before AAA could test a room (Fabre and Meltzer).
Smith recalled a meeting with administration officials that she and her
partner were urgently requested to attend on April 13. They were left alone
with the district's attorney and James Wood, head of the district's panel
of experts as well as the person hired to help defend a lawsuit filed
against the district. Woods told them to stop testing for mold. The
attorney told them not to speak with anyone other than the administration:
not the press, not the parents, not even the regional superintendent. He
said, "We are the experts. We will convince the community that it is safe"
(Fabre and Meltzer).
Now AAA, along with the community, had become the "other," the enemy. The
administration became the polemicist, "abolishing the partner rather than
recognizing him (them) as a subject with a right to speak" (Cooper
41). And not only keeping the knowledge to themselves, but manufacturing
the knowledge to suit their means. This intent could be concluded from the
attorney's comment.
It must also be noted that the board was not entirely in unison. One board
member often chose to speak for the community; but was denied "significant
voice" through motions by other members to move to another discussion item,
rush to a vote, or table discussion. This habitual tendency to stifle his
comments, his verbal vote, weakened the integrity of their decisions. Jaksa
and Pritchard suggest that by not allowing significant voice robs group
participants not only of their right to meaningful discussion, but also
decreases the likelihood the group will make morally acceptable decisions
(147). Sissela Bok cautions that "in professional and powerful circles,
where those who might object are not given a voice, and where those
considered 'wise' can be those most likely to agree..." (97) the situation
calls for the test of publicity, a public hearing of the less powerful
groups' points of view. As well, asserts Bok, reasonable people from
outside of the situation should weigh the potential harms. But try as they
did to enlist themselves into the board's inner circle, volunteers
including the city mayor and local clergy members heard their offers declined.
The most pressing issue, deciding where to place the East students in the
fall, met with a wide range of suggestions. However, a contingency
committee of parents, students, teachers and administrators eliminated any
option of uprooting middle school students, and the board agreed. Within
weeks, however, the board chose to disregard the committee's leading
solution of placing all high school students together on a split schedule
at the partially vacant North campus. In a late night vote, unannounced as
part of the evening's agenda, the board majority decided to move a middle
school of 1,200 students onto a field outfitted entirely with mobile
classrooms using outdoor hallways, thus freeing their building for the East
students. Of the district's three middle schools, the board chose the one
school that solely feeds into East high school. The board stated they
reversed their promise to leave middle schools unaffected because of the
overriding need for both high schools to retain their individual
"cultures." I felt this odd because the North school had only been open for
one year and one-third of its students had begun at East. In fact, many of
us felt this really meant the school board did not want to acknowledge nor
deal with the inflexibility of North high school's administration and staff
to ease the progress of a shared school. Every social arrangement benefits
some people at the expense of others (Starratt 185-202). In this case, the
North students benefited the most. They were left alone in a spacious and
well-equipped new school, while the East students were placed in a building
too small for their numbers, which offered limited technology, athletics,
and academic resources. The eleven- and twelve-year-old middle school
students bore the full expense in their trailer park. Schools are supposed
to be dedicated to the well-being of children, yet these students had
virtually no voice in what happened here (Greenfield). For (this) reason
alone, the leaders' conduct should have been "deliberately moral."
(Lashway) Were their actions moral? With their decision, the board chose
to place middle school children in a disadvantaged situation for an entire
year—leaving two other middle schools "advantaged"—and to fit all the East
students into the small middle school with limited resources, leaving North
at 60% occupancy with full educational resources. Many in the community
felt the "deliberately moral" solution would have been to reconfigure both
high school populations to share one campus and receive equal academic
opportunity. I certainly did: my younger two children, Nick and Maggie, now
would be spending their entire sixth and eighth grade years in a
high-stressed, crisis situation of an emergency mobile school, to be
erected, furnished, staffed and running within six weeks. Many in the
community also felt the shared high school solution would have been more
fiscally responsible rather than the temporary establishment of an entire
mobile middle school as well as the addition of 17 overflow mobile units
for the high school students. Throughout previous years of inadequate
maintenance and poor follow-through on recommendations, the school board's
fiscal irresponsibility had become a major public concern.
The third window: The press speaks for the silenced.
Many embittered community members continued to attend board meetings, now
to express their interest in rebuilding versus repairing the East high
school. Given the age of the building, its long list of structural and
maintenance problems, and the gravely diminished stature of the school
board as overseer, many residents felt this was an opportunity to finally
secure a safe environment, and one that was fairly comparable to the North
building. And with the previous board decision to erect mobile encampments,
students would have already been displaced, allowing an opportunity for
rebuilding. The board repeatedly labeled this effort a "want, not a need."
A cost analysis conducted by the board showed questionably low figures for
the repair option.
"Facing an angry mob of parents," the Kane County Chronicle reported of a
September 10th meeting, "the (board) interrupted its regular meeting
Monday, apparently to call the police." The newspaper tells the story the
district did not want to hear. As one parent emotionally pleaded with the
board to consider fully exploring the costs of rebuilding the school
against repairing, only a $9 million difference according to her
calculations, a board member called for early adjournment. Many board
members and administrators left the room, and a phone call to the police
reported a mob action in progress. With board members outside the room,
another parent used the microphone to show the audience large photographs
of mold-covered shipping boxes from East that had been moved to the middle
school. The same company which had shipped these boxes was now currently
employed in the East buildings in another cleaning capacity. Superintendent
Kostel stepped back in and shut off the sound system. Johannesen holds that
dialogic attitudes may be applicable...in public communication (67). In
this particular case, tolerance of presentation of reasons by others and
openness to scrutiny by others are both ethical standards that seem to have
been ignored.
Although the board decided to return and continue their meeting after a
five minute absence, one board member warned that if residents could not
control themselves, the board would dispense with citizens' comments while
they conducted the remainder of their business. Here, focus is on the
board's monologic agenda, not on the audience's real needs, and the board
is impervious to any influence (Johannesen 61). Not a surprising tactic,
given their history; and perhaps the most surprising aspect of the ongoing
crisis was the consolidated and untiring efforts of the activist community
to be heard in the face of constant refusal.
As stated earlier, the board failed to uphold certain recommended
standards in its Code of Conduct. "Violating rules (standards) can be
considered immoral whenever people, by their
actions, intentionally provide an unfair advantage over other people with
whom the organization or its members compete or interact" (Thomas
30). Parents, teachers, staff members, even courageous students who
detailed their physical problems before large crowds, all asked for and
initially expected a fair hearing. When fairness was abandoned, there
simply was no higher authority to turn to. "The agency that holds the moral
expectations is particularly important because that agency is the entity
responsible for determining guilt, setting sanctions, and implementing the
sanctions. The authority for actually assigning sanctions is held by agents
within the particular group whose moral standards have been breached."
Thomas suggests (36) that people outside the jurisdiction of the group can
influence by public outcry. But if the outcry is muted, called into
question or ridiculed, the attempt at influence is impotent.
Although some citizens were permitted to comment later in this tumultuous
meeting, at the end of the long evening the board did, in fact, vote to
repair rather than rebuild. This was a decision that many in the community
felt was rushed and not representative of the majority (Walter, "Board
Faces Rowdy Crowd."). Coleman cites the Kane County Chronicle's story
giving voice to the meeting's outcasts as a clear example of civic
journalism. "It was the right of the parents to respond and state what they
thought of the school board's actions regarding the health of all concerned
and how their taxes were being spent. It was our duty and responsibility
to provide the forum for this debate in a free and open society. To not
give this account would have made us as guilty of controlling and censoring
the parents, as the school board."
Through brute force, the attendees were effectively transformed from
participants into consumers. Aronowitz laments the loss of public
involvement and communication in recent years due to an elitist and
technical rationality that excludes many from participating in an "open
society" they understand and find accessible (Lucaites qtd. in Cooper 29).
This broadens my concern for those residents who did not attend meetings
nor assert their right to dialogue, but nevertheless were disenfranchised
by the process. For some people, the scientific terminology, the
mold-speak, and the meetings' cumbersome mechanics (and clashes) were
off-putting. Aronowitz has written that participatory alienation, when it
affects citizens, prompts them to find community in the marketplace and
transforms them into consumers (Aronowitz qtd. in Cooper 29). The St.
Charles citizens were forced into this role when denied participation as
stakeholders. Yet even as consumers, ultimately they are disadvantaged. The
marketplace is controlled by the school board, there is no choice within
the public school system, necessity to educate their children drives their
consumption, and the product is a dangerously constructed and questionably
repaired 30-year old school building. Of course, the end consumers are
their children. And my questions on the whole dynamic of school board rule
were answered: The state board's self-important posturing has trickled down
to the local level, where it has been mastered.
Conclusion
The culminating struggle between this small American town and its
negligent, autocratic school district occurred on the evening of September
10, 2001, and we awoke the next morning to that unimaginable horror of
enormous scale. Over the following months we felt our security and stature
as U.S. citizens diminish as we stoically sent our children to school in
make-shift encampments and crowded temporary hallways and classrooms. Some
of us had considered home schooling, alternative or private schools, and
even withholding fees—pretty impractical for many tight-budgeted, dual
working parents who needed a public school. We placed our hopes in the
close friendships of the children and faith in their teachers. Due to poor
drainage for rainwater amidst their tangle of outdoor walkways, the middle
schoolers took to wearing T-shirts reading "Mobile Bay Water Polo
Team." Many of the high school students developed a premature
"nine-to-five" disengagement. Yet despite the different world, in the
larger sense and within the boundaries of our town, a more familiar
relationship with our daily newspaper had transformed the way we functioned
as citizens, neighbors and parents. It offered not only information, but
diverse viewpoints, dialogue, and reflection: the vital role of civic
journalism.
One year later, when the actual cost of repair far exceeded the earlier
estimate to rebuild, a school funding referendum was soundly defeated. That
subsequent April saw the election of two new school board members who
represented alternative viewpoints to incumbent members—in fact, one was a
leading activist during the mold crisis. "I do believe that many
individuals learned through (the mold crises) that you can affect and alter
processes through public debate and personal involvement," notes Coleman.
"After all, nothing had happened for many years despite persistent
complaints by students, parents and teachers. Then a select few finally got
fed up and refused to be part of the apathy and/or reluctance of past and
current school boards and administrations to address a possible health
threatening situation." And their local paper told their story.
As a parent and community member, it is reassuring to know that my local
newspapers respect and share my interests and concerns. Their involvement
and coverage of the school crisis was certainly a step in the right
direction to building community integration, not to mention more regular
readership. It is my hope that narrative essays such as this will encourage
future journalists to become aware of the ethical value of their work, and
to realize the consequences of their local reporting and its impact on
community well-being. And that they will be influenced to adopt pro-active
and critical standpoints to secure a future where all voices are heard.
NOTES:
1. This essay is best read as an autoethnography. Also referred to as
alternative, postmodern, or new ethnography, autoethnography is an
experimental research narrative that utilizes textual analysis. Its
methodological approach examines personal experience in a world in which
the lines between fact and fiction often seem confusing, unclear or
unreliable (Neumann 173, 192). Neumann has written that autoethnography
embraces the ethnographic impulse that looks outward with the
autobiographical impulse that gazes inward. While with ethnographic texts,
"what is left in and what is left out, whose point of view is represented,
how scenes of social life are depicted" are very important matters,
autoethnography focuses directly on the experience of the researcher in
order to unpack social and political significance (Lindlof & Taylor 17,
289). Whereas Ellis and Bochner identify 36 variants of the term
autoethnography, Van Maanen's 1988 typology of the "critical tale" genre in
experimental writing perhaps best describes this author's work: that which
is morally concerned with depicting social structure from the perspective
of disadvantaged groups and with addressing inequalities in the interest of
achieving greater social, political and economic justice" (Lindlof & Taylor
288, 289). Emerging consensus has identified the following evaluative
criteria: Autoethnographies should be well written narratives; engage
readers emotionally and intellectually by evoking shared experiences,
interests, and frames of reference; address multiple audiences; and be
credible, ethically accountable, and generalizable (Lindlof & Taylor 292).
2. I owe my husband, Bill Page, a Daily Herald columnist during this
period, acknowledgement for helping to build my awareness of the conflict
at its beginning stages. Thus I was able to fully experience, with a
combination of disbelief, shock and anger, the evolving hegemonic actions
of the school board, its impact on the community, and the facilitating role
of the local press.
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