Things have been too quiet in the district for Howell School Board member and teabagger Wendy Day, so she has decided to whip up another controversy aimed at embarrassing the school and bring her more attention in an attempt to feed her huge ego.
She posted on her “blog" that board president Debi Drick violated the Open Meetings Act (OMA) by telling union leaders they could have a private audience with the superintendent candidates the board is currently interviewing, and on Thursday the local newspaper picked up on it and published yet another front page story featuring Day.
Drick denied Day’s claims and said union leaders merely asked her to introduce them to the candidates. That claim was backed up by a story in today’s paper where Interim Superintendent Lynn Parrish said the “events that led the Howell Public Schools Board of Education Trustee Wendy Day to publicly claim her fellow board members broke the law Wednesday was based on a "misinterpretation" of an e-mail she sent to board members the day prior.”
In Day’s warped mind, the real crime is that Drick dared to be respectful to teachers and especially the union members, who are as much a part of the community as parents. She claimed on radio station WHMI that Drick routinely polls fellow board members and conducts public business via email, which is a violation of the OMA. However, only something involving and potentially embarrassing to the union promoted Day speak out on this alleged violation of the law.
She is an extremist who hates the union, and she collaborated with anti-union activist Chet Zarko a few years ago to obtained union emails from union members to try and embarrass them that have ended up in court, costing the district more money in attorney fees.
She has a long history of extreme rightwing activities and brewing up controversy to embarrass the school district she hates so much but gets her name in the paper.
We first heard of Day when she helped co-founded a now dead an anti-gay hate group called the “LOVE (Livingston Organization for Values in Education) PAC” that sprang up in 2006 in response to a diversity flag they mistakenly claimed is a gay pride flag that promotes and endorses homosexuality.
That misguided witch hunt gained her the national attention she so craves, and it helped her get elected to the school board in the spring of 2006, even though she is anti-public school and home schools her children.
It wasn’t long after her election that she launched a book-burning episode in the fall of 2006 by trying to ban the book “The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them.” That led to a book-burning campaign against such classic books as Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut and "Black Boy" and "The Bluest Eye” by Richard Wright.
That saga finally came to an end in the spring of 2007, but not before she subjected the community to national ridicule and reinforced the image of Howell as a racist, intolerant community, but it did give Day the attention she craves.
But Day kept her name in the paper by helping organize the racist, corporate “tea parties” we were subjected to last year; she remains an organizer in that “movement.”
Day continued to spread hate and discontent among school board members and district employees, but that came to a head last summer when the board fired Superintendent Theodore Gardella after just a year on the job by a vote of 4-2.
Because he was anti-union, Day loved him, and she made the unprecedented move of helping launch and run a recall campaign against her four fellow board members who voted to fire Gardella. The effort, of course, failed, and this appears to be another salvo in that attack. The real funny thing is what Day said in her latest “blog” rant about the board:
“The worst part is that from my seat, the school board is more dysfunctional and less effective than it was the day I was sworn in.”
Ya think? I wonder why that is? It will be much better off when her term mercifully ends this year. This woman is so hated by a community that’s very conservative that she no longer allows any comments on her “blog.”
But the good news is that she again got her name in the paper. Apparently, her ego is even bigger than her hatred of unions, teachers and public schools.
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