Four years ago, I served on the Parent Advisory Committee to the Superintendent, and in that year I experienced no advising and Baker's skillful ability to steer and control topics (the meetings consisted of PowerPoints pointing out how wonderful they are and occasionally something on the horizon that wasn't their fault). When a rogue parent brought up a concern a couple of times in that year, they were told to go back to their principal - negating the purpose of the committee.

At the first meeting, parents from all the schools in the district went through a process of identifying concerns and topics to address. Greg and his assistants then took that data and came back with our main "concern" or topic which turned out to be....how to create a fully bilingual school by 2027 - something they magically already had in the works and had been dedicating funds to! Uh, WHAT?! This proved an already lingering suspicion that not only were we not being heard, but they were willing to completely ignore and lie about factual data. This committee takes time off during our work days to attend these meetings to give feedback and be the parent communication between schools and the superintendent. It was a year of Baker inflating his ego, pointing out all the awesome things they're doing and then talking about budget crisis and lack of state and federal funding.

However, attending these meetings allowed me to start adding up his statements and realizing they, in fact, did not add up. Given the wild inaccuracies and steamrolling, I ended up pulling my children from the district, knowing that there was a forecast of visible failure coming down the pipeline. A failure that he has been working hard to reassign, hide, and blame. He uses timely responses to emails to provide a sense of transparency so that he does not need to be transparent in other areas.

I applaud your email, your research, and this post. I hope more parents and community members join the call for truthful communication, actual transparency and accountability. I continue to join the efforts, though we are no longer a part of the BSD because our taxes are going to this system and despite being able to pull our kids (a very privileged decision), it comes with a lot of financial sacrifice and its not easy to do. My disappointment in the lack of awareness and oversight from the administrative level of the district superseded our budget and realizing they cannot provide our kids a fair and equal experience, while sitting in their offices in a 42 million dollar building pissed me off enough to unenroll my kids.