Lesa Keith to Attend First MPS Board Meeting as School Board Member
The Montgomery County School Board will have a new member seated at the table tomorrow. Lesa Keith, the whistle blower who exposed grade-changing in several Montgomery Public Schools, was sworn in last week and starts serving tomorrow. She sat down with us to lay out her goals for the school year and to explain what might hinder those goals.
It’s been a little more than two years since grade changing was exposed in Montgomery Public Schools with the help of Lesa Keith. Keith was elected to the board in June, after beating out incumbent Heather Sellers and on Tuesday, she will be seated at the table for the first time. She spent the past four days at an intensive training session in Birmingham held by the Alabama Association of School Boards and says she left feeling a bit confused.
“There are so many rules and so many regulations and so many ethics laws,” she says. “And it’s almost a threat. I was told that if I say something out of line, my board can sanction me. If our board looks like we are not working together, then the state can sanction the board.”
Keith tells us the first two days of the intensive trained new school board members on what to say and what not to say. She says the training for the following two days encouraged board members to speak out about wrongdoings. She says it’s that mixed message that’s left her with a lot of questions.
“I think I understand other board members,” she says. “However when some of those board members, or one of them, very nicely in a nice way told me to put my passion over here, listen and gag it, it sends a mixed message.”
Keith says she wants to get project-based learning and hands-on job training in some Montgomery Public Schools but tells us strict rules and a tight budget may hinder her goals.
“Why are they only budgeting 31 dollars per student per book when I mean, here we are at South, and you’re not going to find a book less than 100 bucks.”
And Keith says she plans to keep asking the hard questions even if it means she could be sanctioned or punished.
“This board forces you to, well I call it drinking kool-aid. I don’t want to drink the kool-aid.”
Keith says while at her intensive session, she did bond with the other school board members. She says she’s anxious to work with them to better Montgomery Public Schools.
The Montgomery County School Board is scheduled to elect a new board president and vice president at Tuesday’s school board meeting.
