White County Board Decides To Direct Emails To Individual Members

Communication with the school board again a topic for the White County School Board as they voted to provide emails and phone numbers for residents who want to speak to board members.

School Board Chair Bob Young said questions submitted by the public at the current “Ask The School Board” Link on the website are going to the School Director to be answered. The board created the website link to better interact with residents.

Director Of Schools Kurt Dronebarger said the questions tend to be operational in nature, but he wants full-transparency.

“I want people to know who they’re talking to when they submit a question,” Dronebarger said. “So what I’m proposing is that when they click on Ask the School Board, it’s going to go to the page that has all your email addresses or phone numbers or whatever you provided on the contact. And so that way they know who they’re contacting. And if they do send a message about third grade that you don’t know, then it’s going to promote conversation between us because you’re going to forward that to me and say, ‘hey, can you answer this for me?’ And I’m going to again copy you on that response so you know it was responded.”

Last month, the school board discussed an anonymous question system that allowed teachers and staff to submit questions and ideas to the administration. At least one school board member wanted to be included in that conversation.

“If it did come to a point of contact with the school board that was monitoring that, that could be based on the district from where the question came from,” Young said. “It could be directed to the representative from that district. It could be a situation where it comes in and it needs to be a question that we don’t have the answer to. We could then in turn direct that to the administration through the Director. But Mr. Dronebarger has asked that he’d not be the point of contact for this link.”

“What’s happening right now is it says Ask the School Board, and it’s not really asking the school board, it’s asking me,” Dronebarger said.

The board discussed a single-point system where all emails would go to one person to be answered or moving to a system where emails could be directed to specific board members. They decided to provide the information so residents can talk to whom they want.