From Community Relationship Builder to Vicious Partisan Middleman | The Scottsdale Parent Council

What started as a ‘70s era “women who lunch” civic club is now just another woke-captured institution standing between you and your school district

This is a first for Longer Thoughts – a guest column written by a few Scottsdale parents that I’ve come to trust and respect. This is a large topic and deserves some background history to put into perspective. Not many parents understand what these non-profit organizations are doing – I certainly didn’t. But these dedicated parents have all the history – and the receipts – to show why the Scottsdale Parent Council (SPC) is an institution that’s long outlived its usefulness.

I first heard about SPC when I was digging into Scottsdale’s school curriculum adoption issues and their chronic violations of the open meeting law. I found a board meeting where a staff member assured the board that all curriculum adoptions had “parent representation” on the adoption committees. Apparently, that only meant SPC representatives had participated and that was the extent of the “open” process to engage the community. I knew that for purposes of the open meeting law it doesn’t matter WHO is on the committee, the meeting just has to be noticed and held in public. Having a non-profit parent organization on the committee doesn’t suddenly, magically, transform a closed-door adoption committee into an open public meeting. But here was a senior staff member referring to the SPC like it was some kind of stand-in for ALL parents demanding transparency around curriculum adoptions. From the context of the presentation I understood it has ALWAYS been this way in Scottsdale.

What I later learned, and what you’ll read in this series of articles by these parents, is that the SPC is actually just a small group of insider parents that screens membership for WrongThink© and whose main institutional purpose is to, literally, stand in parentis loco on your behalf with school officials at the district level - to make the administration’s job easier.  The admin doesn’t have to deal with parents – the SPC does that for them. And from what I understand, many other school districts have similar organizations that do the same. It’s time for that to change.

Part I is below, more coming…

@ALegalProcess

Part I. The Scottsdale Parent Council

You’re probably familiar with the traditional school parent organizations: the Parent Teacher Association (PTA), Parent Teacher Organization (PTO), or an Association of Parents and Teachers (APT). Every school year they ask for donations. Many of us donate since throughout the year we see the great things these organizations accomplish for our education and our community. Although each might be organized differently, they all serve a common mission to empower Arizona families and communities to advocate for children, support learning, and to assist their sponsor schools in collaboration with, and communication to, parents. Most, if not all, operate as 501(c)(3) organizations. Many districts also have school booster clubs and/or site councils. Parents generally learn about these from their school district and childrens’ schools. 

However, there is another type of influential parent organization that is rarely mentioned, if ever, in communication from school districts or school officials. Many district parents have never heard of it, and, yet, this particular parent organization has much greater access and influence on the district than any single school site council, PTO or PTA ever has. It is a district-level organization and purports to represent ALL parents. You can think of it as an umbrella parent organization – and if you don’t know yours, you should find out about it now.

In Scottsdale, this little-known, district-level organization is called the Scottsdale Parent Council (SPC). And if you are supporting a school’s parent organization in the Scottsdale Unified School District (SUSD), you may be unwittingly supporting SPC.

By design, SPC is open to all Scottsdale public school stakeholders. Anyone residing in Scottsdale or working for the district can join and membership is free. But here's how the institution gets its real insider power – each school in the district is automatically a “member school” and has the right to appoint two representatives from its “parent community” to the SPC. Just how those two representatives are appointed by a school is an open question. Common practice is that each member school’s principal appoints them. But does the SPC executive leadership pre-approve? What happens when more than 2 parents vye for the role? The bylaws are silent on this point – but as you can imagine, getting nominated to one of those seats is the very process that enables the SPC to collude with school officials to screen out unwanted parents from a leadership role. 

But there’s more. SPC has two distinct classes of membership – voting and non-voting. Only the leadership team and the school representatives – who have been nominated somehow – have actual voting power at SPC. And who elects the leadership team? Voting members, of course! Individual members have no voting power. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see how such an institution can purposely install a set of well-connected insiders who advance based on who they know – and how well they align with district goals and ideological bent. SPC does not currently publish the identity of these voting members. No one outside of the organization and a well-connected group of insiders know their identity. How’s that for transparency?

So what does SPC actually do? Well, they have committees. Like this one that attacked Hopi Elementary for a holding a non-SPC sponsored fundraiser that hauled in $300,000 – by hiring an enormously talented and well-respected black DJ: 

Rita Panahi @RitaPanahi

‘ASU instructor, and a librarian, who hold themselves out as being Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion gurus, falsely accused a Black DJ of wearing blackface during a charity event for the Scottsdale Unified school district.’ Scottsdale’s DEI Gurus Accuse Black DJ Of Wearing BlackfaceThis week, an ASU instructor, and a librarian, who hold themselves out as being Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) gurus, falsely accused a Black DJ of wearing blackface during a charity event for the Scottsdale Unified school district. Stuart Rhoden and Jill Lassen attacked the Scottsdale Unifi…arizonadailyindependent.com

April 15th 2022

45 Retweets159 Likes

Mistakes happen, but the pompous email sent to the Hopi PTA president, as well as the doubling down of an SPC member known to shame community members for personal opinions, yet again put SUSD back into national and international news.

Since this superintendent was hired – how many times is that now? 

When SPC isn’t busy scouring school fundraisers for privileged people’s transgressions, it has regular, scheduled access to district officials (including the superintendent) and direct funding from district schools’ parent organizations - all while doing nothing for the district or community that any other parent organization or school district couldn’t accomplish in the 21st century. Afterall, their total budget is only a few thousand dollars – it’s not like they are financing great community projects, scholarships or other community events. Yet, it does accomplish what school parent organizations and school districts try to avoid like the plague - vitriol from self righteous board and/or committee members targeted at parents who dare to disagree with them on issues such as Covid measures, education, and/or identity politics. They have an agenda –it probably isn’t yours and 100% it aligns with the district. AND they have access – you don’t.  

Seems like a really nice group of folx. 

Parental Ally or Political Foe?

SPC was founded in 1977 as a non-partisan, non-sectarian, non-commercial organization with a broadly stated purpose “to promote communication and collaborative relationships between Scottsdale Unified School District families, district leadership and staff, to support and to advocate for the highest quality of education for all students attending schools managed and governed by Scottsdale Unified School District.“ 

The founders of SPC likely had good intentions, although they are rumored to have been politically-biased ones. Veteran members of the SUSD community report that SPC began as an organization for the “left” and was often unwilling to cordially discuss issues with conversative community members. Not much has changed in that regard.

But as the educational/political climate of SUSD has changed over the last 45 years, SPC has taken on a much larger role within the district. And as communication has changed over the last 45 years, some SPC executive board and committee members have taken to social media to seek and destroy dissenters. 

Often sarcastically referred to as the shadow “6th Board Member,” SPC’s greatest acceleration of influence seems to have occurred after its 501(c)(3) approval in 2019, just prior to the hiring of the current social justice warrior superintendent – just as COVID-19 was seized upon by teacher associations and district administrators to close down schools.  This perfect storm of events has led to the SPC many parents know today - an elitist clique of parents with district access whose only unique purpose is to attack divergent viewpoints with partisan and hateful rhetoric, and a current superintendent willing to turn a blind eye under the guise of SPC “autonomy” with a - hey, they don’t represent the district whenever that excuse suits him. 

Since SPC is incorporated and a nonprofit (with a sub designation as a 509(a)(2) public charity), it gives cover to SUSD to make statements to the media like this one:

While this is true in legal terms, SPC states that SUSD recognizes it as a support organization and works with it to advance its purpose and mission. SUSD has not disputed this. SPC’s President meets monthly with the SUSD Superintendent, and the Superintendent attends SPC’s monthly general membership meeting for “community Q&A” sessions - under the “forceful” supervision and control of SPC staff. Here’s the superintendent’s report to the board on how unpleasant questions are handled at these “community Q&A” sessions: 

But when the district needs volunteers, for example, to form a closed-door DIE committee - they call SPC. SPC then solicits, screens and presents suitable volunteer “representatives” properly vetted for alignment:

Or when the district is choosing senior leadership hires, such as a superintendent, they don’t just make a call to the public. Again, they call the SPC, kinda like politicians paying for their own polling results:

Other district personnel are routinely guest speakers at general membership meetings. Over the years SPC has hosted other programming focusing on issues that impact the SUSD community and those that don’t. To further conflate the SPC/SUSD district “separate” relationship, SPC’s mailing address is the SUSD district office.  

See how this works? Let’s create an organization to support schools – that school insiders can easily control – where parents won’t have voting power. And when the school needs “parent representation” they’ll come to us – like they do with curriculum adoptions and other committee work. What exactly does this so-called separate district parent council accomplish that any other parent organization or school district could accomplish with Zoom and YouTube? And who is funding it? 

End of Part I.

In Part II, we’ll look at how SPC funds itself for this middleman role. We think you’ll be surprised.  Stay tuned. We’re just getting started.