At Wednesday’s Community Engagement Committee meeting was the perfect illustration of what’s wrong with the Bridgeport Board of Education.

Instead of discussing anything remotely substantive, the board spent over an hour bickering over whether to approve a flyer for an October 22 community forum at Cesar Batalla School–the first of the four community forums the board approved earlier this year.

What was wrong with this flyer, you ask? Well, nothing, except that it didn’t make its way across the vast sea of red tape the board imposes on any decision.

According to Chairwoman Sauda Baraka, the only board member to have a problem with the flyer, school board policy 9130 states that any decisions must come before the full board. Meaning, even though the full board approved the event, the flyer could not be sent out to parents until it was approved by the board.

Even crazier, the Parent Advisory Council President Tammy Boyle chimed in, telling the board she felt “the parents” were being “disrespected” because the flyer was never brought to the Parent Advisory Council Executive Committee.

So, just to be clear: Baraka and Boyle were suggesting that nothing, including a flyer, can be approved and sent out to parents until it goes through a committee, the full board, and then the executive PAC.

Talk about red-tape. And we wonder why nothing gets done?

Luckily saner minds prevailed on Wednesday night. The community engagement committee ended up voting in favor of moving forward with releasing the flyer to the public.

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