A participant's perspective on Weatherly
Regarding to your Feb. 16 article about the Carbon County Court appointing the current Lehighton School Board vacancy, I would like to add clarity about the historical Weatherly Board Court appointments from 1999. I was on that board then and am still on it now.
It has been and still is my contention,that Judge Richard W. Webb made two mistakes or misjudgments during his execution of those proceedings; the first eventually causing the second, with his response to the PDE petition to the courts to have that 1999 Weatherly teacher strike end. Ultimately, hearing these details, people can better decide.
Webb's first mistake was when he scheduled court-ordered negotiations daily (Monday-Friday, Saturday and Sunday) from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and 7-10 p.m., forcing all employed board members to miss work (requiring use of vacation and/or personal days), never considering board members have work obligations outside the education world.
This hardship became impossible for employed board members to comply with Webb's negotiation schedule. Some board members had to resign their unpaid taxpayer-elected positions in favor of work and family! It was only after these good board members resigned and the April board vacancy replacement meeting did not occur that Webb realized his mistake and revised the negotiation schedule, ordering negotiations to take place only "after work hours," evenings and weekends.
Once he allowed board members to go to work FIRST and negotiate after, obligatory conflicts changed. The four original members who were ultimately forced to resign to retain their jobs (Schneider, Gregory, Hart and Andrews), petitioned the Carbon County Court to reinstate them, under this more relaxed time schedule, to continue their elected board duties and persevere in the ongoing negotiations process.
Petitions with hundreds of taxpayer signatures to reinstate those four "elected" board members were circulated, signed and presented to Webb.Yet three of those four reinstatement requests went knowingly unanswered by Webb (Schneider was the only one reappointed) as a result of the court hearings.
As to the article's comment that I "failed" to attend the April special meeting to appoint board vacancy replacements, I wholeheartedly disagree! I purposely walked the other way that evening and left the building at 5 p.m. - to have supper with my wife - before returning for our court-ordered 7-10 p.m. negotiation session later that evening. Not allowing for a quorum at that meeting was the ONLY leverage I had, as an original board member, to not allow our existing board members to appoint enough new board members chosen specifically to vote YES for that contract just to "get it over with." I knew it would then go to the courts.
Webb's second mistake, in my opinion, was that he knowingly appointed three new and different unelected walk-on petitioners (Pilecki, Stump, Kudlick) despite the original members' petition requests for reinstatement. Instead of making the original board "whole" again, heappointed different members.
The several "votes" necessary to approve and ratify that contentious teachers' contract prematurely were realized - within several days of resuming negotiations. His lone decision usurped all the time invested, intense thought, strategy and hard work of that original board's negotiation efforts to date, which ultimately resulted in an even greater contract cost to the taxpayers of the Weatherly School District.
I anticipated Webbwas going to make the right decision under the newly relaxed court-ordered schedule and reinstate all four original taxpayer elected board member petitioners. All four requested to return to build upon their negotiation efforts to date then. Yet Webb again chose wrongly to ignore them and replace three with three new board appointees. In doing so, he tilted the balance, which resulted in that contract! Trusting in the courts here was my mistake.
Respectfully submitted,
Gerard Grega
Weatherly School Board Member - then and now
