If You Ask Me / By Martha Knight

There is such a thing as too much information. We know it when we hear it. Usually we are not at meetings of record when it happens, but there have been times…

Years ago (more than 20) there was too much information at a school board meeting. There was no need for it. The public interest was not served. The school district and an administrator got sued over it. I have reason to believe there were lasting “scars” one adult can trace back to what he experienced back then as a child.

I didn’t want to use the name, and didn’t include it in the story I filed in an area daily, and a weekly.

The editor of the weekly disagreed, and obtained the name of the family, and used it. “It had come out in a public forum, and it was fair game” was how the editor saw it. I wanted my byline taken off the story. Seems to me it was.

Sometimes information that should not be printed is known by at least some in the community, but it is not the duty of the press to compound the harm by printing it just because it may have been spoken out loud in a public forum, or heard on a scanner, or bandied about by that prolific post-er, Anonymous, on some blog.

In that instance long ago, a third grader who had not failed any of his classes and had passing grades was nevertheless slated to be “kept back.” At the end of the school year his parent and stepparent were told he was going to repeat third grade.

The reasons were several. He was seen as having been stressed by family matters. He was rather immature. The step from third grad to fourth is a high one. The administrator had spoken with the boy and asked him whether he would mind doing third grade again, and the boy had said that would be okay.

Nonsense! Of course the child would mind! Would he say so to the administrator? Probably not. But he would be miserable at the thought of his friends going on without him, and of the stigma of having “flunked.” He would graduate a year late. He probably felt that nothing would ever be the same.

Immature? Um, children are immature, by definition. Is it tough on kids to adjust to fourth grade, after finishing third successfully? Maybe the curricula need some adjustments. (In those days, before state-wide standards and assessments, that could have been done at will.)

The parents were not convinced by the school’s reasoning. “We want our child placed in fourth grade, because he has not failed third, and we do not agree that being kept back is in his interest” was how they saw it. When the system was adamant,  they took the boy to a licensed school psychologist in a nearby city for an evaluation.

Here was a qualified professional whose opinion was not to be ignored, and his opinion was that the child should be placed in fourth grade. If the boy did have any learning deficits, those could be addressed in fourth grade, and they were not such as would make his promotion problematical. So the lad went on to fourth grade with his age contemporaries.

We might suppose that would have been the end of it. But there was the matter of the fee. The parents learned that they were entitled to be reimbursed for such reasonable fee as they had paid when they had found it necessary to consult an “outside professional” in such a matter. They had been charged, and had paid, $225, and they billed the school district for that sum.

The administrator at the center of this matter could have taken the standard approach to that. He could have just put the item on the bill list, which nearly always gets approved in a perfunctory manner.

But no, the administrator broke the fee reimbursement item out as a separate item on the agenda.

Did he veil the reference to the item by describing the purpose of the payment this way: “A couple decided to have their child evaluated concerning our proposed placement in the same grade again, and according to law we are required to reimburse the fee they paid, if they so request”?

No, he described the circumstances, using the surname of the family involved. That identified the child, although his given name was not used.

People who attended the meeting in person were aware of the identity of the family. But then, as now, few people other than board members and key staff attended school board meetings. Board member and staff have a duty to treat as confidential any information they receive concerning students’ health, evaluations and grades. Even among staff, personal details are to be shared only on a need-to-know basis.

If other members of the public were present at that board meeting I am describing, one would hope they would exercise decent discretion. But the use of the family name in the paper, in that context, did cause humiliation.

Fast forward to a couple of years ago when I had occasion to use that young man’s name in the context of some rather silly hoo-rahing around with a pal,  maybe in a state of inebriation. I can’t say that child who had been subjected to unnecessary humiliation and feelings of inadequacy and shame, decades earlier, was utterly doomed to commit disorderly conduct once he attained majority. But I believe that experience caused him lingering pain, and that kind of pain is harmful to humans. It was gratuitous.

•    •    •

As we wait for the Grand Theater to be demolished, we can empathize with Bellefonte, where the Industrial Development Authority has torn down the Garman Theater.

The Bellefonte Historical and Cultural Association had tried to save the historical structure,  after Bellefonte took control of the property under the Pennsylvania Abandoned and Blighted Property Conservatorship Act after the Hotel Do De, next door, was destroyed by fire in 2012.

A developer had been set to restore the building for use as a regional arts center, but the Progress Development Group wants to combine the Garman and Do De sites and another site and build “workforce housing apartments.”

Such “progress” seems unlikely at 4 and 6 North Main Street here.

Peace.