School’s board sets rules for firing

Members allowed to vote out others

ROGERS — Arkansas Arts Academy board members unanimously approved a policy giving them the power to remove a fellow board member under certain circumstances.

It is the f irst public school or school district in the state to enact such a policy, academy officials said.

A draft version presented at last month’s board meeting stated that a board member could be removed “with or without cause.”

That phrase was eliminated after some board members expressed discomfort with it. The revised policy, approved Tuesday, states only that a violation of the board code of conduct or code of ethics could be grounds for ousting someone.

Even then, two-thirds of the board — meaning at least five of the seven members — must agree to the ouster for it to pass.

Mary Ley, the school’s chief executive officer, said she’s aware of incidents elsewhere in which a board member’s conduct has embarrassed his school or district.

“I think it would be terrible, when we have such a nice little institution, that if someone did do something silly, we couldn’t do anything about it,” Ley said.

Board members of traditional public school districts cannot be removed from off ice except by voters through the regular election cycle when terms expire. A traditional school board may not “invent” a process to unseat an elected public official, according to Kristen Garner, a staff attorney for the Arkansas School Boards Association.

The academy, however, is a charter school. Its charter, approved by the state, allows the board to create a board removal policy, Ley said. Charter schools are public but operate free of some regulations that traditional public schools must follow.

Academy board members serve three-year terms. They are elected by parents of the school’s students.

Also at Tuesday’s meeting, the board for the second time postponed a vote on a new social media policy for board members in order to gather more feedback from the Arkansas School Boards Association.

The policy outlines school-related information deemed inappropriate for posting on social media, including personal information about students and their families, legal cases involving the school and anything otherwise considered confidential.

A section of the proposed policy states that board members should not “post, tag, or comment or otherwise identify students in any social media” other than their own children.

Board member Joe DeRouen asked if the rule would apply if a picture from a child’s birthday party happened to include other students.

That wouldn’t apply, Ley said. But officials expressed concern about pictures of groups of students taken at school-sanctioned events and posted to a Facebook page for academy parents.

Barb Padgett, principal of the academy’s high school, said some parents deny the school permission to publish photos of their children or let them be photographed or interviewed by the media. There are good reasons for that, she said.

“I’m just saying, I would be very careful posting pictures of children other than your own,” Padgett said.

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