On Jan. 31, 2023, Mahomet-Seymour Board President Max McComb wrote an opinion piece for the News-Gazette in rebuttal to what board member Meghan Hennesy said at the Jan. 17, 2023, regularly scheduled board of education meeting. The following are just excerpts from those pieces. Hennesy’s speech (Jan. 17) can be found here. McComb’s opinion piece (Jan. 31) can be found here.
This project is not an attempt to look at every issue that was brought up in its entirety. This publication has reported on some of these issues before. In those cases, links are provided so that each reader can learn more about the issue. The articles that follow are an attempt to look at the claims each board member brought up. In some cases, one board member named others. In those cases, this publication looked at what happened surrounding those claims. All of the articles can be found on this page. Each article also includes documents and videos referenced.
We understand that this piece comes two months after these events took place. We have taken time to watch discussions of every topic over the last three years, to look at board agendas and minutes from the same time period, to read emails, to send FOIA requests and to undertake a major project in analyzing TIF data. This work took time, and that is why it took so long to complete.
Quotes from Hennesy
“Pleas from community members about discussion items that this board could take on, in my opinion, go unheard and unadded to agendas. We’re in a situation where the Superintendent and the Board President control what gets put on an agenda. And if they don’t want to talk about it, in my experience, it just doesn’t make it to the agenda.
“You can ask in a meeting for it, it doesn’t make it. You can ask per the rules that they’ve set up to get it on there and it doesn’t make it. And it’s supremely frustrating because it’s not just things that I want, it’s things that the community is coming to me because they want to voice in it.”
….”And I don’t think that this board is serious about the types of priorities that I have when it comes to curriculum and protecting kids and protecting staff, and shoring up those items and making sure staff has appropriate supports. And the reason I say that is we just canceled a study session that was scheduled in January because ‘there was nothing to discuss.’ Nothing to discuss. I find that shocking. We’ve had discussions about bullying. We had discussions about curriculum. There was nothing to discuss.
“And in point of fact, the board had decided that that meeting was supposed to be about talking about district goals. And you’ll see it on an agenda tonight. But it’s only because I followed up after the agenda items had been released and said we did as the board decide we were going to talk about district goals in January. This is the last meeting that we could do that. We should put that on there. Now, do I think a real discussion about goals is going to go on shoehorned in between all the other things that we have listed here tonight? No I don’t. And do. I think that we’re seriously gonna take a look at that? I do not. Because the study session would have been the place to do that. And instead, we just canceled it because we didn’t have anything to do.”
Meghan Hennesy
Quotes from McComb
“She laments that our policy states that the board president, working with the superintendent, sets meeting agendas.”
“However, we have met with IASB consultants twice over the past four years to attempt to come up with new board working agreements — including changing the process for creating the agenda. However, Mrs. Hennesy and Dr. Schultz don’t like IASB recommendations and have blocked attempts to put new working agreements into place.”
Max McComb
Looking Back
According to the Illinois School Code and Mahomet-Seymour Board Policy, the board president holds no additional power over any other school board member other than what is set forth in the guidelines. Policy 2:110, which states those duties is embedded at the end of this piece.
For this conversation, though, policy 2:220 is better suited:
Policy 2:220 gives the board president the power to make an agenda, deciding what topics are appropriate or not.
In order to understand what topics have been included on the board agenda (not the amount of time each subject was discussed), we analyzed board agendas from 2018-2023 in three sets: open session subjects in sections “unfinished” or “new business” from:
2018-2023 (board packets available online)
2019-2023 (2019 is when three board seats changed: Hennesy, Schultz, and Keefe took those seats)
Sept 2019- May 2022 (the time period during which agreements with the Village for 13 Acres, Middletown Park, and the TIF extension were taking place)
While topics like finance, staff contracts (particularly those of administrators, and specifically that of the former Superintendent), COVID, and policies, including PRESS policies (a service which ensures that board policy matches state law), ruled the scope of board agendas from 2018-2019, Hennesy is not incorrect in saying that topics like facilities, the Bulldog Blueprint referendum, and agreements with the Village of Mahomet for property and a TIF extension took precedence over topics like curriculum, bullying and diversity (which wasn’t talked about enough for the graph-making program to recognize its validity).
There were several times within the Sept. 2019 to May 2022 period when board sessions were solely called for the purpose of agreements with the Village, Superintendent contracts, and the Bulldog Blueprint while, for the most part, topics like curriculum or diversity were included on an already packed agenda.
In the case of curriculum (not instructional materials or textbooks), Schultz, Hennesy and Henrichs were the catalysts for the development and transparency of curriculum to be included on the agenda. In many cases, as Hennesy and Schultz asked for agenda items per the guidelines set forth within board agreements and board policy, their request was often denied or even ignored.
Per board policy 2:230, the public may participate in a meeting by submitting their request with 7-days notice:
McComb refers to board agreements, which have been discussed many times over the last four years. The data shows that the board discussions of the board’s function took precedence over other topics, like curriculum, instructional materials, technology, and facilities, to name some.
In an attempt to understand the behind-the-scenes of the board agreements, which was a large part of that statistic, this publication sent a FOIA request for those documents. It appears the request was incorrectly fulfilled, and will be sent to the Public Access Counselor for further review. With that, Hennesy and Schultz, on more than one occasion have stated that they followed the agreed-upon submission guidelines, but those items have not appeared on the agenda. If we should get a proper response from the district, we will share it with the public.
The board was never able to come up with working agreements that were voted on. Most of that discussion either happened via email or in closed session.
