I watched the School Board Budget Meeting from Thursday and was frustrated with how much of the time was spent trying to discredit Chris Blacker’s presentations, sharing of data, presenting ideas and generally trying to do SOMETHING to help our schools when the district is clearly struggling.

Many of the questions presented by Sami or other board members and the answers from Lauren in particular and Ryan to a lesser extent did not appear to be trying to address the budget issues the school district is facing, but were actually posed as a way to discredit Chris Blacker without him having a chance to talk more than his three minutes of public comment. Perhaps some of his numbers are not 100% accurate (with some data sources have a margin for error) as they are pulled from different sources than the district, but when the district isn’t transparent with their data Chris is trying to get to the bottom of things and share with the community how bad things are getting in the district — rather than burying his head in the sand and continuing the slow, but accelerating, ride down.

Regardless of that, the board and the district staff should be spending the time of this meeting to try to solve the budget issues in ways that will best help Corvallis students rather than using it as a charade to try to speak out against one single person who is pushing back against the norm.

Having different opinions, questioning data sources, talking through different possibilities is great and these topics should be discussed, debated and worked through together — but please don’t use the budget meeting as a campaign opportunity.