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March 28, 2024 6:35 pm
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LETTER: Open Letter To CCSD Trustee Chris Garvey and MV Community

During the Moapa Valley Community Education Advisory Board (MV CEAB) meeting on Friday, I directed a comment toward Clark County School District (CCSD) Trustee Chris Garvey that was poorly presented. The rudeness of my comment was unintended and has bothered me ever since. I hope that she and others that might have been offended by my remarks will accept my apology and allow me to express my thoughts with more respect and dignity.

As I said in the meeting, Trustee Garvey has a vital role in our community. Her presence was very important and she had important information to communicate. I have no interest at all in silencing her or any other representative of CCSD.

However, I have noticed a pattern in recent public meetings that is concerning to me. CCSD representatives routinely stifle public discourse by dominating the time allotment of the meetings. For example, a two hour public hearing on sex education curriculum can reduce the number of commenters from 50 to 15 if the CCSD limits every comment to 2 minutes, but spends unlimited time to rebut each comment. Alternatively, the hearing could allow 50 commenters, but stretch into a six hour hearing. Either way, all public input will be vastly outweighed by CCSD’s voice.

The length of the hearings is not in and of itself a bad thing. But some meetings have stretched well past midnight. In at least one instance a meeting was forced to end without action because it had exceeded legally-permitted time constraints. It is clear to me that extending meetings as long as possible is an effective tactic to discourage public participation and to avoid actions demanded by the public.

It is more difficult for parents to hire a babysitter for a six hour hearing on a school night. In the case of the MVCEAB meeting, people who stretched a lunch break to attend for an hour were forced to drop out when the meeting dragged to four hours.

If you drag meetings out while simultaneously limiting the time available for the public to speak, you largely defeat the purpose of public meetings. To be clear, you not only limit the public’s ability to speak; you also limit their ability to listen and to consider other positions.

If I might be so bold as to summarize Trustee Garvey’s comments during the meeting, they went something like this: She has recently stumbled upon information that indicates that all local CEABs were dissolved many years ago and that ours has been operating all these years without proper mandate. She doesn’t know how this happened without anyone seeming to know. It just seems to have fallen through the cracks. She would be very willing to seek the CEAB’s reinstatement with CCSD or to help in whatever way they wish. She feels badly about this unfortunate situation.

All of this was important for Trustee Garvey to communicate at the meeting. Unfortunately, she spent an hour expressing what I have summarized in the paragraph above.

To be fair, everyone else in the meeting spent an hour expressing their outrage. But they did not each spend an hour. Any repetition or overlap in their individual comments served to strengthen the message of united indignation. Each of those comments helped to clarify the extent of unanimity of public opinion.

I have noticed that there are many committed community members who have been willing to attend these important meetings. They patiently listen and consider all that the school district has to say. They travel as often as it takes and wait courteously as long as it takes. They wait for their turn to speak; sometimes their turn is revoked.

I fear that, as one who has not spent the many hours these dedicated parents have spent, I have shown my impatience in a manner that might reflect poorly on them. I apologize to Trustee Garvey and to those parents for my rudeness. I am confident that their diligent approach is better than my impatient approach.

I would like to ask more courteously that Trustee Garvey and her CCSD peers be more considerate of the public in their communications. Anyone who knows me will find it comical that I should censure anyone else on talking too much. Indeed, this very letter is too long-winded. Believe it or not I worked hard to make it this short.

I know the CCSD folks have difficult jobs. I know that interacting with the public can be difficult. It is human nature to want to defend yourself when you feel you are under fire and it is a lot to ask them to spend less time defending themselves. Perhaps it is too much to ask.

I will try to be more patient. I hope they will try to impose less on the time of all who attend these meetings. Let’s work together to make the time we have to interact with each other as effective as possible.

Sean McMurray

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