Davis Parents group seeks voice in schools

Davis Parents group seeks voice in schools
ClipperFARMINGTON — It’s apparently never a good idea to ignore what your parents have to say, even if you’re a school district. The Davis Parents Association (DPA) is a grass roots organization recently started by several Davis County parents to make certain they have a voice in school district decisions. The inspiration for the group, according to DPA spokesman Randy Smith, came during the public comments phase of the district’s current plan to redraw several high school boundaries. “People who didn’t like the plan were allowed to vent, but there was no mechanism in place to bring those views to the school board,” said Smith, by day a chief financial officer for a development company. “Parents should be allowed to weigh in, but the school district didn’t want to hear it. So we decided to band together.”The DPA expresses several concerns about the proposed changes, the most prominent of which is safety issues caused by longer student commutes to school. Their web site, www.davisparents.org, includes examples and case studies showing a higher risk for teenage fatalities, as well as a recent court case that suggests potential accident liability issues for the district.At one point the site also held a fictional newspaper article written by Smith that detailed a fatal accident caused by the boundary changes and the court case that followed. Though Smith recently removed the article, he admits that he still doesn’t understand the largely negative response.“I was absolutely baffled. I can appreciate that people don’t want to think about a teenager being killed, but it was no worse than anything you can find in the newspaper,” said Smith. “UDOT (Utah Department of Transportation) lost a lawsuit recently because they hadn’t performed a cost/safety analysis, and I wanted to show an example of what could happen here.”The group maintains an e-mail list that can be joined via their website, and recently used it to send notice of a meeting they requested with the school board to express concerns about the boundary changes. Though the list was the only announcement of the two-hour meeting 50 people attended, with 15 groups requesting to speak.“Parents tend to get passionate about their children, and a fundamental belief of many of us is that they know what’s best for their kids,” said Smith. “We’re focusing on making that position known to the district and the school board.”Despite their current efforts, the DPA considers the boundary issue to be merely the tip of the iceberg. No matter how the situation is resolved the group plans to continue to be a presence in school district decisions, eventually hoping to have charter groups from every Davis County school so that even more specific issues can be addressed.“As important as this is, the boundary issue is really only a minor skirmish in the quest to make sure the district is run well from a parent standpoint,” said Smith. “The board needs to be the watchdog of the school district. When you have a board that gets too comfortable, you end up with something like Enron.”