How do you remove your school board from power?

[snowball22]

Help!!!!! Our school district is in a financial nightmare. No one including teachers, parents, and students support our local school board. We want to make our whole school board resign but are not sure how to go about it. At the last public meeting, a parent got up and asked the school board to resign and the school board just looked at the parent and ignored the question. Has anyone gone through this before? Do we need a petition, are there specific laws to follow, do we need an attorney to get these goofs off our school board? They have misused our money in so many ways and now they want more money from us. If we don't pass the next levy they are going to charge between $600-$1800 per high school sport per student to play and $145 for each extra curricular activity, take away most of the bussing, and so forth. They have dumbed down the schools, taken away our tech classes, and have streamlined foreign languages and ap classes. We would gladly pass the next levy if we had a new school board with some common sense. Anyone every been through this? Any suggestions? Thanks.

 

[Karel]

Do you have people willing to run and do the work? I would wait until elections and start supporting candidates slowly take over the board. It'll take awhile but you just need to get a couple of new people on to get the ball rolling.

 

[snowball22]

We just elected a new guy to the board and he has already been sucked in to the "school board club". What is very scary about this is that our supintendent is wanting to run for state superintendent of all the Ohio schools. The whole Ohio school system will be a complete nightmare if our current superintendent gets to his political ambitions. As for the leg work of trying to remove these people, we have more than enough people who would do the work.

 

[Toby'sFriend]

I guess you need to find out if your State or Local Laws and/or policies provide for a petition for a Recall Election?

 

[rt2dz]

You have to check their by laws. You will also probably have to run for school board and get others to as well. Good luck!

 

[Royalbear]

Our school board members are all elected officials, with the exception of the superintendant, but they can make his life so miserable that he'll want to resign!! So if we don't like our officials, we can always vote them out of office. So far our schools have performed well and our cost per pupil ratio is one of the lowest in the state, so I think they are doing a pretty good job.

 

[disneymom3]

Well if you lived in my district it would be easy--they are dropping like flies! We had a year of arguing and sniping at each other and now the head of the board resigned by walking out of a meeting, the superintendent resigned, another person called for another member to resign--he was the reason the chair had resigned in the first place--and when he wouldn't, she resigned. Seems to me one other one resigned too.

It is a mess and in the meantime we have really high property taxes and the largest class sizes in our entire state.

Good luck. I admire you for trying to fight the system. I just gave up on it and we homeschool 'cause I didn't have the patience to wait around until they got it right.

 

[Laz]

Growing up in Ohio, having relatives in Ohio, and living close to Ohio, I know the finacial troubles the schools are having. I believe a parents in a few smaller towns in Ohio took matters in their own hands a while back and starting running extracurriculars themselves. They kept the books, bought and rented what they needed, and payed the coaches and officials. They did it much cheaper and more efficiently than the school system. That might be an option.