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Royale Bonds
Breeze – Courier Writer
TAYLORVILLE — The Taylorville School Board unanimous voted at Wednesday night’s special meeting to postpone the approval of purchasing the mental health building until the August meeting. The board agreed to develop a plan for how the building will be used and get estimates of costs.
A consent agenda to consider personnel caused ten- sion between board mem- bers. Superintendent Dr. Chris Dougherty wants to hire a social worker for the district. Board member Brenda Patrick asked that the consideration of personnel not be under the consent agenda because more clarification is needed on the salary of employees.
Patrick said, “Looking through the training that I had, was that routine items such as accepting donations, approving minutes of the last meeting, things that we do regularly should be consent agenda.”
School board President David Driskell said this is how it was always done. Patrick wanted to know the salary of a particular employee that the board is hiring. She said if a future employee doesn’t have a PEL, then she has no way of looking them up.
“This is you not preparing for the board meeting,” Driskell said. “These are questions you should’ve asked before.”
Patrick said she did ask these questions before the meeting and they went unanswered. She then asked the salary of the employee during the meeting. President Driskell said they have never done that before at a meeting and he is not about to start now.
The consideration of personnel was passed, with Brenda Patrick voting no.
The allowance of fund transfer from Working Cash (Fund 70) to Capital Projects (60) was approved with an unanimous vote. The Working Cash Fund has $14 million in it and $9 million of it will be transferred to Capital Projects. Once funds are in Capital Projects, they cannot be transferred out.
A resolution was adopted by the school board that allows them to make deci- sions regarding how to handle COVID precautions in lieu of the state. If the State has no set guidelines or rules, the school board is free to come up with their own plan of action.
As of right now, Illinois is in Phase Five so there is no mask mandate currently.
Any Board member may ask to have an item removed from the consent agenda according to Robert’s Rules. No Explanation.on it is necessary. A member would ask to remove an item if that member wanted to discuss it,,ask questions on it, or have a separate vote. After members have had plenty of opportunity to remove any item from the consent agenda,a member moves to approve all of the remaining items. There can be no discussion or amendment of this motion The vote is taken and all items that were on the consent agenda are approved by the one vote.
This is no “bargain” property. There is no plan for what it will be used for. There has been no “inspection” of the buildings condition, yet someone on the Board keeps pushing this purchase. Something is rotten about this deal.