Near the end of a Thursday work session, members of the Cobb Board of Education tore into one another when one of them tried to add a discussion about COVID-19 protocols to the Thursday night business meeting.
COVID-19 issues were not included on the agenda for either meeting, although most of the citizens who signed up to speak at the work session’s public comment session were there to talk about those topics.
There also was a protest planned for 6:30 p.m., a half-hour before the evening session, on the mask issue.
The arguments blew up when board chairman Randy Scamihorn asked his colleagues to approve the night meeting agenda as amended. At that point, board member Tre’ Hutchins made a motion to add a discussion item about COVID-19 protocols.
Some parents have demanded a mask mandate, and the district recently revised its quarantine protocols with the start of the school year.
Nina Gupta, the Cobb school board attorney and the meeting parliamentarian, said the board could add an agenda item if it’s considered an emergency that’s arisen since the last meeting.
Hutchins, who was attending the meeting via Zoom, said he thought the COVID-19 measures and the district’s rising case totals constituted an emergency.
“That’s why I’m asking,” said Hutchins, one of three Democrats on the seven-member board.
But Scamihorn immediately said there’s not an emergency, and the district’s protocols have “never been presented as such.”
He denied Hutchins’ request, and board member Jaha Howard, another Democrat, asked: “Are we not in an emergency?”
Scamihorn ruled that he was out of order, then called the question and over objections announced that the vote to deny adding the COVID-19 discussion was 4-3, with the board’s four Republicans in the majority.
Hutchins objected from his remote location that “I made a motion but did not vote.”
Howard, a pediatric dentist who has clashed openly with Scamihorn several times this year, interrupted the chairman, who growled at him: “Dr. Howard, do you have no manners!”
The board then adjourned to an executive session.
Scamihorn also attempted to get his colleagues to approve the hiring of Taylor English, a Cobb law firm, to draw a map of Cobb school board posts to present for reapportionment.
The three Democrats objected, especially when Scamihorn hadn’t provided a cost estimate. So did Republican vice chairman David Banks of East Cobb, who said he didn’t think hiring a third party was appropriate and that the maps would be “whatever the legislature decides it looks like.”
Scamihorn, who said hiring the firm was only to get the process started, decided to table the measure until the evening meeting.
Cobb is one of the few school districts in metro Atlanta without a mask mandate. Earlier Thursday, Marietta City Schools announced a mask mandate starting on Monday.
But COVID-19 topic came up at the Cobb work session only from members of the public.
East Cobb resident Caryn Sonderman thanked the district for keeping masks optional, saying “you are following the science and the facts.”
Stacy Efrat of East Cobb, whose family has tested positive for COVID-19 and whose children are home in quarantine, bemoaned the lack of academic support for students who cannot be in school.
Unlike last school year, Cobb is not offering simultaneous instruction in classes and for remote students.
“You are encouraging parents to send their kids to school sick,” she said.
Connie Jackson of the Cobb County Association of Educators may have prefigured the melee at the end of the meeting when she said that in her 20 years associated with the Cobb school district, “I have never seen a debacle like [what] our current school board is.”
She was referring to a lack of respect she said some have shown to others, although she didn’t name names.
Over the last three years, Jackson said, “we have lost so many of the things that have made us great.”
She complained that “nearly half the school board”—a reference to the three Democrats in the minority—has been silenced.
In order for agenda items to be discussed at meetings, members must get a majority of their colleagues to agree.
But the Democrats could not get one of the Republicans to put COVID-19 topics on the agenda.
Instead, the board heard presentations about student outcomes, a tax abatement involving the South Cobb Redevelopment Authority and the demolition of the former East Cobb Middle School campus.
Superintendent Chris Ragsdale also has the ability to bring agenda items unilaterally, but he did not mention COVID-19 protocols at the work session.
Board governance issues are among the topics that prompted a special review by Cognia, the board’s accrediting agency, earlier this week. Those results are expected to be released this fall.
You can watch the work session at this link.
Related stories:
- Residents concerned about Walton HS sports complex plans
- East Cobb mom pulls children from schools over mask policy
- Former East Cobb MS demolition on school board agenda
- Cobb participation down sharply in 2021 Ga. Milestones testing
- Cobb schools report 587 COVID-19 cases; 46 at East Side ES
- 5th graders at East Side ES to learn remotely until Aug. 23
- Cobb schools report 185 COVID-19 cases during first week
- Cobb schools revise quarantine protocols; masks ‘strongly encouraged’
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