Hostile crowd jams school board meeting

More than 250 people made up an unruly audience on Monday, Jan. 25, at the Belleville High School cafeteria as the Van Buren Public Schools Board of Education met for a work/study session to discuss a possible new procedure for lockdowns, new reports for teachers, and results of a climate survey.
The meeting had to be moved from the administration building to the high school because of the expected crowd. And, people spilled out of the regular meeting area at the high school into the rest of the cafeteria in the largest crowd every seen at a school board meeting in at least 20 years.
The people in the audience were very unhappy over the gun with bullets discovered on a high school student that the principal and superintendent found was not a danger.
They were also very unhappy about the supposed cheating scandal at Savage Elementary that resulted in Supt. Michael Van Tassel removing five teachers. They supported the teachers and questioned Van Tassel’s investigation that was instigated by him contacting the state. Then the state asked him to investigate and he did and found improprieties.
Richard Rytman was spokesperson for a large number of those present.
He said he has been asked to talk for those who are afraid to talk, which he said was very strange to him in a free country like the United States.
Rytman first spoke under the Agenda Items part of the agenda, discussing the Climate Survey that had been given and was to be discussed that evening.
Rytman gave information on the percentages of teachers leaving since 2012 when Van Tassel became superintendent. He said it is more akin to an inner city school, running from about 16% in 2012-13 to 21% in 2014-15.
He said there were 164 teachers that have left through the current administration.
He said he received 10 telephone calls since the last board meeting and some people said they are afraid to talk openly because they are afraid of retribution against themselves, family members, and their students.
Rytman asked for a formal, independent investigation to look at the climate in the schools and said the hostile environment needs to be identified.
“So we don’t end up like Flint,” he said. “There’s something wrong and we need to identify it.”
He asked the board to put on their next agenda and consider an independent investigation into why those teachers are leaving.
Rytman said he doesn’t have all the facts on the Savage situation, but for those teachers to be walked out during school hours when the children were in class was not right.
He asked the board to look at what is the real situation. Board president Brent Mikulski called time on Rytman’s remarks and there was a long, standing applause from the crowd for Rytman as he stepped down.
“I’d like to interject that the board didn’t know they were walking teachers out of Savage,” said Trustee Sherry Frazier.
A man called out from the audience, “Mr. Moore knew. He was there.” He referred to Director of Curriculum Jeff Moore who was at Savage along with Human Resources Director Shonta-Langford-Green and those two did the teacher removals.
President Mikulski then read a written statement about how no employees should be named in the board meeting and other statements on the tests at Savage and the gun situation at BHS.
When Mikulski said not alerting the parents was “a judgment call by the principal,” people in the audience called out they had seen Principal Abdul Madyun on TV and he said he and Supt. Van Tassel made the decision.
It was announced that Madyun would hold a town hall meeting at 6 p.m. Wednesday to answer parent questions on the gun, but it was a last-minute decision and no one could say where it would be held. Parents were told Van Tassel would not be there.
First speaker under the Non-Agenda Items part of the meeting was a father who started off with, “The truancy policy is horrible.” He said his daughter has missed three months of classes and his son missed 21 days.
“And, bullets were in a different part of the backpack and was not a big deal? Are you kidding me?” he asked.
“I blame the principal, superintendent, and all of you sitting up there,” he said to the board.
“We got a red alert on the gun,” Trustee Frazier said. “I assumed notification had been sent out to parents.”
The father said he thinks the board members should get the same alerts as parents. He said a school secretary told him the threat on Monday wasn’t for Belleville.
Rytman said he had been a fire arms instructor and he would never say bullets near a weapon do not render that weapon dangerous.
“When he thought about bringing that gun to school, he endangered the students. … When he entered that building with a gun he endangered the students,” Rytman said.
He said the school board does not have all the information on the M-Step situation.
He said he was a former federal investigator and you can have the best case, but if you don’t have all the evidence tied up, it will fail. He said parents have told him the students were confused when they were being questioned. They were asked repeatedly over and over in different ways about the test.
“This is setting the board up for a law suit,” Rytman said. “The entire investigation is in jeopardy because of the way it was handled.”
He urged the board to get an open investigation that can present the facts to make sure the board has all the information.
He said he knows an investigator who is known statewide for his work whose approach is above reproach.
Michael Gentz held up a letter in a sealed plastic bag and said he received the anonymous letter in a school envelope without a metered stamp. He said it was supposedly from a “Savage employee” who had knowledge of the investigation.
Gentz said the letter said the district believes these teachers have cheated and “I should back off.”
“I’m not gonna back down,” Gentz stated.
“I support all the teachers in Van Buren Public Schools and I support Savage,” Trustee Frazier said.
A mother asked why the public can’t see the report from the state with all the names blacked out. She wants to know what the irregularities were.
“Parents are asking for results of the investigation,” said Trustee Frazier. “We [board members] have not received results of the investigation.”
Another mother said her youngest child who had been tested at Savage and moved up to Owen school this school year was handed an envelope openly at Owen.
She said those who were having their scores invalidated where openly given the letters, “so they could be pointed out as cheaters.”
“This is the tip of the iceberg,” she said. She said that day’s supposed threat to the school came out at first that it wasn’t this district and then it was.
She said she is ready to pull both of her children out of the district and be done with it.
Tamara Mayfield, a 2007 BHS graduate, said she works for a very transparent company and the school district should be transparent. She said her child would have cried for weeks over losing a teacher.
“We need you as board members, principals, teachers, to keep our children safe,” she said.
She asked what the district is doing about the child that felt threatened enough to bring a gun to school.
Another parent, Kimberly Kowalski, said she went to the Department of Education web site to read about the new M-Step test that was created in 9 months instead of the years such tests usually take. The web site said this test cannot be compared to other tests and yet Van Tassel’s letter compared it to MEAP and NWEA tests. The web site also said it is not tied to any funding or scholarships.
She said it is a flawed test that cannot be used to compare.
Trustee Frazier said the results were used to accuse Savage of cheating instead of praising them for accomplishing something respectable. “Some schools scored so low and nothing is said about them,” she said.
People in the audience called out for Van Tassel to speak to that, but Van Tassel did not speak at all throughout the meeting. After the meeting he was trailed from the room by a Channel 4 camera and a reporter asking for an interview. All he said was, “No comment. No comment.”
Van Tassel usually leads discussions at the work/study sessions, but not this time.
Angela Bennett, with students at BHS and Owen, said two of the honors teachers at the high school were removed from classes last week and sent for training, just a few weeks before exams.
She said the students are understandably stressed out. She said teachers in other districts have told her that never happens in their schools in the middle of the year.
She said with the way the hand gun in the high school was swept under the rug and the vague warning about threats to the school, “I’ve lost faith that the school protects our students.”
She said she strongly questions the ability of Van Tassel to be an independent investigator in the Savage case.
“We will not stop pursuing this unless we get answers,” she said.
Another mother said there was no reason to march out the teachers at Savage other than to humiliate them. When she went to the school on Friday, police were there, she said.
Parents said they were trying to protest but Van Tassel called Van Buren Township police who removed them from the property. On Monday, parents got permission to use subdivision property across the street and protested there. That’s where the Channel 4 truck was parked on Monday.
Another mother said her fifth grader is brilliant and the whole class is brilliant, but then five teachers were removed and the integrity of the district brought into question.
“My son came back home with a letter in an open envelope,” she said. ‘When do you plan to discuss this with us? Teachers I highly respect have been accused.
“I want answers from our board. I want answers from our superintendent,” she said.
A mother who said she graduated from BHS in the class of ’94, said her son’s underwear was ripped off and he was videotaped. She said she saw this video on line of her son being harassed. She brought the issue to school and homecoming was cancelled and her son was threatened because students were blaming him. She said the incident was downplayed by the principal who called it a “wedgie.” Nothing happened to the football players who did this to her son and they got to play as usual.
She said she took off work to come to this meeting. She suggested parents sue the district or remove their children from the district.
Trustee Frazier apologized to the parents. She said a bullying policy and a gun policy are in place and available to the district.
In other business, the board:
• Briefly discussed a proposed program that involves a lockdown of the school when a shooter is in the building. Curriculum Director Moore said this is just a brief overview, but “When an intruder is in our building, use some common sense.” The crowd erupted in laughter at this comment, with one hollering out, “Great idea”;
• Heard Moore say that the performance management program now calls for reports from every building, every month. “They may not get a good score if their tests are too high,” called out one parent as she left the meeting;
• Heard a report on the anonymous, on-line Climate and Culture Survey of students, parents, and staff that found all of the district’s results in positive or neutral stage. No results were given for comments and Rytman said there was a spot for comments because he entered comments when he took the survey. He said he questions the validity of the results. Rytman asked to be allowed to speak to clarify something and President Mikulski denied him the chance to speak. “The survey was a joke. Don’t pat yourself on the back,” he said, adding, “Administrative action taken against staff without the board being informed?”
An online petition to fire Van Tassel had more than 1,000 signatures by Tuesday noon.