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New TUSD board member: "Policies are a mess"

Posted at 7:53 PM, Jan 04, 2017
and last updated 2017-01-04 21:53:15-05
Rachael Sedgwick is less than a week away from taking her seat on the TUSD board after a surprise win in the November election. Sworn in last month, the former teacher and current law student is already making changes in district policies, including discipline.
 
How and why is she doing that?
 
"I became aware how much people in Tucson, in TUSD, are seeking change." So TUSD board newcomer Rachel Sedgwick got to work right away. Knowing there's a high learning curve, she delved into district policies. "I began at the TUSD website and I read just about every policy and I'll finish reading all the policies this week," she said.
 
And what she says she discovered: "They were a mess. Some policies had not been reviewed or updated since 2005. Other policies literally had incomplete sentences in them. Unfinished thought. It looked like someone was working on it. They got called away and they never came back to fix it. And somehow that was the policy that was adopted." 
 
 And she spotted piecemeal fixes to complex problems. "You can see that people changed one policy that deals with that issue -- but not the other three or four and so it doesn't make sense." No doubt confusing staff, students, and parents, she said. "Why is this policy here, but we practice something different. I'm not understanding. And now I see why because the policies are a mess and people probably don't refer to them because they understand they don't have much meaning -- those don't have teeth." And that includes the discipline policy.
 
Our investigation into the issue revealed administration downplayed discipline problems over the past few years to reduce suspensions and expulsions and then reversed course this school year after more fights and assaults erupted. 
 
"We're going to be honest about the problems so we can fix them. Discipline really is an issue right now. Our discipline policy is a problem. The practiced policy versus the written policy, it's a problem and it needs to be fixed," she said.
 
In a nutshell, Sedgwick says she's finding the problems, cleaning up the policies, and then sending her changes to the district's legal department for input. Of course, any changes in policy require board approval.