Wake GOP urging people to attend Tuesday's school board meeting

The Wake County Republican Party is also calling on supporters of the new Wake County school board majority to turn out Tuesday in favor of the community-based school assignment resolution.

In a Sunday e-mail message, Wake GOP Chairman Claude Pope Jr. tells the group's members that people need to show up Tuesday to counter the "left-wing obstructionists" who've packed the board meetings "with often unruly protesters." He tells Republicans it's time to show up Tuesday and be heard at the board meetings.

"Our board members are facing the slings and arrows every day trying to accomplish what we want them to do," Pope says in the e-mail message. "I promise you they will appreciate more than you can ever know if you show up and let them know the people whose wishes they are serving haven't abandoned them."

There are some quibbles with the details in the message about the times Pope listed.

The school board will meet in public at noon, not at 3 p.m. The latter time is the regular board meeting. The noon start is for the committee of the whole meeting, which serves as a work session.

You can attend at noon in the very cramped quarters of the board conference room. WRAL says it will stream the COW and regular meetings live in case you don't want to come.

You may want to get there around noon even if there's no room left for the COW meeting just to get a seat in the board room for the main meeting.

The signup sheet officially goes out at 3 p.m. But it will probably be on the table at some point ahead of that.

Here's Pope's e-mail message:

Your School Board Needs Your Help

Last fall, in one of the most important local elections any where in the country, a conservative slate of candidates backed by the Wake County Republican Party swept to a decisive victory and gained a majority on the School Board.

But from the moment the new majority began implementing the policies voters had specifically and overwhelmingly demanded and voted for, left-wing obstructionists have sought to derail the reform program. One of their tactics is to pack the public galleries of board meetings with often unruly protesters who of course dominated coverage of the meeting in the liberal media that dominates our community.

The board members are resolute. They are fighting hard to do what you wanted them to do when you voted for them, contributed to the party in support of their candidacies and volunteered your time to promote their campaigns.

That should have been enough, but it isn't.That's why I'm urging you to attend the next school board meeting, which will be held Tuesday, March 02, 2010 at the Wake County Public School System building, 3600 Wake Forest Road, Raleigh, NC 27609. The phone number there is 919-850-1600 if you need more information about the site.

That's when they're going to take up the resolution on switching from the current busing policy to the policy our Republican majority calls "Community Based Assignments." Also on the agenda is the plan for year-round schools.

That makes this one of the most important school board meetings ever. Do you want the galleries to be full of screaming naysayers preening for the cameras? I'm pretty sure you don't.

The second question is tougher. Are you willing to get out yourself, early, because it's first come, first served, and take one of those seats yourself, thereby denying it to someone whose only purpose in being there is to insult our valiant board members?

I hope so.

Now, here's how the thing works: the first part of the meeting starts at 10:00 in the morning, but the "regular meeting" - the part that's open to the public --doesn't start until 3:00 pm. No one really knows yet when the busing resolution is going to come up, but it should be pretty well known on Tuesday. The sign-up time begins a little before noon, and you can sign up and then leave until the meeting starts. But you can rest assured that well before noon all seats will have been reserved, and as I said, it's all first-come, first-served.

If you want to speak on the issue, you can do that, too. You just indicate it when you sign up. And be sure to check the box that says you want to speak on an "agenda" related item, and not a "non-agenda" item.

The whole procedure is definitely not designed to make it easy on us. So the question becomes: do we care enough to put out the effort? I sure hope a whole bunch of you do. Our board members are facing the slings and arrows every day trying to accomplish what we want them to do. I promise you they will appreciate more than you can ever know if you show up and let them know the people whose wishes they are serving haven't abandoned them.

Claude E. Pope, Jr.
Chairman
Wake County Republican