Jim Dey: Apparently, no, they can't all just get along

Apr. 11—Come let us reason together.

Or — in the alternative — let's throw pies at each other.

It looks like members of the Champaign school board selected Option 2 at their Monday meeting. There's no telling where that will lead, especially if someone forgets to duck.

But it probably won't be any place good, what with the finger-pointing, name-calling, etc., going on.

What had been a boiling board cauldron of animosity overflowed Monday when a previously announced plan to begin the selection of appointees ran off the rails.

Two dissenting board members — Amy Armstrong and Betsy Holder — said they would prefer to have Regional Superintendent of Schools Gary Lewis choose the two new board members from a list of applicants.

Why? They said relations between them and their three colleagues — Gianina Baker, Bruce Brown and Heather Vasquez — are so frayed as to undermine the appointment process.

There's obviously something to that. The board has two seats to fill because recently elected board members Jamar Brown and Mark Thies quit in disgust. They apparently had all they could stand and couldn't stand no more.

That's not unusual when it comes to serving on school boards, posts only the malignantly virtuous and utterly moronic aspire to fill. But, usually, these creatures manage to serve their full terms before lighting out for the territory ahead.

Not so here. Brown cited, among others thing, a lack of transparency within the district, while Thies said his vision of local education did not conform with views of the district administration and board majority.

So what does that mean? Anybody here speak English? Don't count on it. This is all inside baseball between factions who do not see eye to eye.

In that context, there's merit to Armstrong's suggestion that each faction will be tempted to game the selection process, choosing appointees who will side with them in this contest of wills. That's just human nature.

Still, the failure to work together on something as basic as a board appointment represents a collective failure of leadership that only the 2025 election can resolve.

But what's next?

Who knows? This is not the first time that Holder and Armstrong have brought proceedings to a halt. They walked out of a recent meeting, creating a lack of a quorum that blocked a vote on an item that Holder asked not be placed on the agenda but that board President Baker included anyway.

Can they agree on anything other than paying the bills? Only that their opponents are moral reprobates.

In the meantime, the Champaign schools are, at best, cesspools of mediocrity, according to test score results released by the Illinois State Board of Education.

But that was the case even before board members embraced a cold war that's starting to generate heat along racial lines.

There was no mistaking Brown's defense of "highly educated leaders" — Superintendent Sheila Boozer and board President Baker — as victims of "accusatory assumptions of bad faith" that are "textbook techniques and strategies used against Black men, women, people of color in power when the status quo is disrupted."

If that wasn't clear enough, one target of his ire spelled it out for everyone.

"I'm tired of being called a racist because I don't agree with people," Holder said.