Orange County School Board Meeting

     I attended an Orange County school board meeting on March 22, 2011. The meeting lasted about 2 hours and the school board went over a lot of information. All of the board members except Mrs. Gordon were present at the meeting, however even though she was not physically at the meeting the board was able to contact her on the phone so she could still be a Part of this meeting.  To start the meeting off the president of the board took role to ensure that everyone was there and then there was moment of silence. Next the president of the board ( Mr.Bill Sublette) recognized  the Orange County Sunshine Sate Scholar  whose name was Andrew who is a senior from Dr. Phillips high school. Andrew was recognized for being an outstanding student, and for all of his achievements that he has accomplished during his years in high school. The next item on the agenda that the board went over was that they recognized all media personal in Orange County and declared that the month of April Media personal month, meaning that all media personal in Orange County be recognized.
     One of the very last items on the agenda was a discussion about charter schools. A few members of the board stated that charter schools started off in a good place but now they are not.  There is a bill being published in Tallahassee that some of the board members are opposed to. This particular bill that is being passed sates is basically saying that if the charter schools fail to reconstruction themselves and fall apart after this reconstruction again the Orange County School Board will be the ones in charge of rebuilding the system. This was a very controversial topic at this meeting and all of the board members has something to say about this topic and it was the exact same thing that  “they do not want to be the ones in charge of the charter schools, their only place on those schools is to make decisions not to run the schools.” The school board came to an unanimous decision the goal of this bill should be that the states should run the charter schools not the OCPS school board. After they discussed this issue the board made a motion to  bring their opinions and thoughts to Tallahassee and let the governor hear what they had to say and to have the bill re written.
     From observing this school board meeting I learned that the school board for Orange County deals with a lot of different issues that are all of equal importance. I had no idea what to expect when going into this meeting other than from what I was told, which was the meeting would be long and boring. Although the meeting lasted about 2hours which seemed like an eternity it was not boring at all. I found the school board meeting to be very interesting learning experience and it is something that I would attend again. I enjoyed this meeting because after it was over I had a sense of what was going on in Orange County schooling system.