Green Dot Offers View of Alternate Universe

Say hello to Marco Petruzzi, CEO of Green Dot Public Schools. Today he made his first blog entry at Green Dot's Website of Bloggy Goodness.

If you're unfamiliar with the Green Dot charter chain, I can tell you that it's one more fine example of the modern charter movement, depending on student skimming, political connections, and the pushing aside of public schools, as well as demonstrating the ways in which a non-profit can be used to generate profits. Petruzzi himself came to the charter world from a partnership at Bain, and makes sure that he himself is well paid for his great-hearted work for the poor. If you want a long, hard look at Green Dot from an insider, try this piece which notes both their liberal use of TFA staffing and their spectacularly bad teacher retention issues. Read here for a discussion of their "issues" with students with special needs.

So the fact that he bills himself as the CEO of a "public" school lets us know right off the bat that we have entered some sort of alternate universe. I must be sure to let my superintendent know that she is missing out by not calling herself "CEO" and setting her own ginormous salary.

Petruzzi, contemplating his entry into blogland, decides that he will tackle some Big Questions. So let's see how these Big Questions are answered in Petruzzi's alternate universe.

A Very Little History

Before the 1980's, public education and the economy fit hand in glove. Manufacturing and service jobs provided "reasonable, if not lavish" middle class lives (thanks to those unions). Upper class students went to college. Poor students did not. And poor, lower class students often ended up in crappy jobs.

In our universe, these sorts of trends were the result of many socio-economic trends, from a loss of cheap energy to the outsourcing of jobs to save corporate a buck. In Petruzzi's universe, there was only one reason for the spread in inequity-- "We failed to ask why a public school system intended to create equal access to opportunity consistently failed low-income students and minorities." Yuppers-- in Petruuziverse, nobody was screwing with access to opportunity except those damn failing schools.

The Birth of "Ed Reform" (I once went out with his sister, Susie Reform)

Blah blah blah "Nation at Risk."

By 2020, two-thirds of jobs will require a college degree. Yet our education system maintains a college completion rate well below 40%, with clear and dramatic differences between ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds. Despite all our advances, the historic concepts of “class” and “race” still predetermine a student’s outcomes.

Again, in this universe this might be a good prelude to a serious discussion about growing income gaps, the unbalanced distribution of wealth, the move from a Maker economy to a Bean Counter and Investment Bankster economy, not to mention of a deep and difficult conversation about how class and race shape the American experience. But no-- there's only one factor to discuss.

So why is it so controversial to readjust our education system to give our students a real shot at succeeding in the rapidly emerging knowledge-economy? And why is it still so controversial to challenge the clear socio-economic inequity of access to those opportunities?

Answer in our universe: it's not, really, unless you insist on pretending that the education system is somehow the cause of the tidal wave of inequity and not one of the many institutions that's caught in the crushing watery wall of onslaught.


A Call for Unity

Can't we all just get along. Petruzzi thinks we should stop saying that union members only care about their jobs and reformsters only want to make a buck. It is not clear whether he is trying to argue that both those things are actually true.

Aren’t we all “reformers” to some degree? Don’t we all want to improve the system for the benefit of students? Can’t the continuing debate about methodology be one of honesty and mutual respect?

These are good questions. Unfortunately, in this universe it certainly appears that the answer to the second question is, "no." When you're using political connections to smash public schools and doing your best to turn teaching inside your own schools into a low-paying low-skills temp job, it's hard to feel the waves of love and respect.

I agree that an atmosphere of mutual respect is a good thing, and there are reformsters I actually respect even as I believe they're wrong about almost anything. But too many reformsters have displayed an attitude of zero respect for teachers from the first moment they showed up on the scene, shouldering aside teachers with accusations that public schools sucked and teachers were the problem. And Green Dot's record of love and respect for public education and the teachers who woirk there is not great. So pardon me for being standoffish until I have reason not to be.

The Challenges of Reform

Oh, boy. In the Petruzziverse, reform "has unleashed a wave of innovations that have jolted the current system and forced it to confront some hard truths." Um, name one. Charters were billed as laboratories of educational innovation, like a scholastic space program. But as yet, we cannot point to a single solitary development, not so much as a jar of educational Tang, that made the rest of the education world sit up and say, "Wow! Slice us off a piece of that." Nothing.

There have also been, apparently, "talented and passionate individuals," and I think it's just as well he didn't name names. Petruzzi admits that some ideas didn't pan out (in his universe "some" and "all" are apparently synonyms). And here's a fun quote: "Some talented individuals have failed to make the announced progress with students." I bet back at Bain, when corporate bosses of companies they were invested in "failed to make the announced progress," that was an occasion for laughter and parties.

Petruzzi objects to having these failures called failures.

Or, even worse, there is an outcry that we are “experimenting” on children’s futures. Nothing infuriates me more. Allowing low-income students of color to languish in a system that fails them generation after generation is NEVER a preferable choice to the uncertainty of a noble attempt to change such students’ life trajectories!

See, when the public school does it, it's okay to call it a failure. And experimenting on poor kids is okay because A) they're poor kids and B) you're thinking noble thoughts while you do it.

The Charter Movement

Now here's a fun new argument. See, in Petruzziverse, he's learned a cool thing- students are not all the same. And I'm trying not to be too dismissive, but seriously, dude-- this is like being back in a freshman dorm room listening to Melanie Potter explain how she suddenly realized that an atom could be like, you know, a little solar system. And did you ever realize that water is, like, wet?

This is the most entertaining brand of ego-- if I just figured something out, I must be the first person to ever figure it out!

The idea is that charters can provide variety better than a big school district. This must be another way that things are backwards over there, because over here, the fact that a large school has ten English teachers means there are ten ways to learn English in that building; unless, of course, you force them all to teach to the same stupid script and follow the same cementified standards, so thanks for helping argue against Ed Reform's Common Core, Mr. Petruzzi.

Petruzzi is once again claiming that charters are engines of transformational innovation, so I will once again ask-- name one. Just one.

Embrace Complexity

In the Petruzziverse, Green Dot has "always embraced the complexity and messiness of ed reform," and I don't want to diss complexity and messiness (I'm very attached to them, as students in my room can tell you) but do you suppose that reform has been so messy and complex is because so many of the people running it don't know what the hell they're doing but just figured that because they could be a partner in a hedge fund they could certainly manage a school after all how hard can it be?

But he is proud that Green Dot has focused on the big problem schools, because I guess they did that out of nobility and not because low performing schools are low hanging fruit for privatizers, like in this universe. He thinks LAUSD and the President totally got it right when they called on charters to focus on the lowest schools and so that's why they took on those schools and this is where I would expect the stories about how they totally turned those places around, but, um, no... nope. No such story here. Probably a first-time blogger rookie mistake. Oh, hell, I'll give him a break here. He could have just lied to us, and he didn't, so that's kind of a win for both universes.

Join Us

This is the work that Green Dot is interested in doing. This is how we’re interested in speaking about the complexities of education and sharing the lessons as we learn from them. This is the point of our blog.

We hope you join us as we explore our successes and our struggles, with honesty and transparency.

I probably won't. Alternate universes are hard on my brain (they make it all ouchy) and this particular alternate universe seems pretty far removed from our own. But it's always fun to have a new neighbor in the edubloggoverse. We'll see what these folks come up with next.

The Courts Speak On Education

Michael McAdoo is suing the University of North Carolina. The premise of his case is simple-- UNC promised him an education in exchange for his services as an athlete, and they violated that agreement when the shoved him into essentially fake classes with no educational value.

UNC's problems with "paper classes" and what has been called "eighteen years of academic fraud" were already large. This will not help.

But Time's coverage of the case notes that, while this may seem like an easy win, case law is not on McAdoo's side, and they refer to a 1992 case based on a similar premise.

In 1992, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit largely upheld a lower court decision to dismiss a case involving Kevin Ross, a former basketball player at Creighton University who sued the school for negligence and breach of contract for failing to educate him. “We agree — indeed we emphasize — that courts should not ‘take on the job of supervising the relationship between colleges and student-athletes or creating in effect a new relationship between them,’” the judges wrote. Courts are reluctant to judge the quality of a student’s education, because “theories of educations are not uniform.” How can you objectively measure the quality of a student’s academic experience? It may be a ‘practical impossibility to prove that the alleged malpractice of the teacher proximately caused the learning deficiency of the plaintiff student.’”

The emphasis is mine. The case deals with the college level and not third graders. But it would be interesting to see if the court's reluctance to rule on what constitutes a quality education, or a teacher's role in providing it, would hold up in lawsuits over current evaluation systems being used to cripple and end teaching careers.

Did the Ohio Board Just Try To Stonewall Critics?

Today was supposed to be a day for the public to offer testimony about the Ohio State Board of Education's proposed cutting of elementary specials requirements, after the proposal cleared a board committee yesterday. Things did not run so smoothly.

Board President Debe Tehar started off the day by announcing that public testimony would be delayed so that Ohio Ed Department staffers could explain the change first. That presentation was already scheduled for today, but this move bumped it to the top of the schedule.

Board member Debbie Cain asked Tehar to explain why people who had taken a day off of work to testify were being pushed back (which presumably could include being pushed back to a time commonly referred to as "tomorrow"). Now maybe the shift was just an attempt to pre-emptively explain things before people could complain about them, but that's not what Tehar said. What Tehar said was nothing.

Board member Ann Jacobs called point of order (parlimentarianese for "I call shenanigans"), and Tehar replied, "I'm the president. I can commit shenangians as I see fit." (I'm paraphrasing)

At this point four board members (Jacobs, Cain, A. J. Wagner and Stephanie Dodd) walked out of the meeting. Wagner lead the charge, he indicated, because of the schedule change and the ignoring of a board member.

[Update: The Dayton Daily News added these details to that special moment:

When Terhar said it was within her authority to change the agenda, a member of the audience called out that the board should vote on the matter, and that if the schedule changed, many in the audience would have to leave.

Terhar told the audience member that she was welcome to leave at that moment.

At that point, Wagner stood up and said, “I’ll leave.” Board members Cain, Stephanie Dodd and Ann Jacobs joined Wagner in walking out of the meeting.

Board member Mary Rose Oakar again asked Terhar to reconsider, but Terhar instructed members of the Ohio Department of Education to begin the presentation.

So I think the "screw you" message from the board president comes through loud and clear.]

The Columbus Dispatch filed this story at 12:12. Public testimony was supposed to begin at noon. No word yet on who or if that is going.

So it looks like this is not going to run smoothly, and that the board is not exactly in agreement about how to handle it. But trying to squeeze public testimony out  the mix by forcing people to sacrifice many work days for the possibility that they may or may not make today's schedule-- that would be a pretty low move.

USED: Nothing-Burger with Cheese

According to Lyndsey Layton in the Washington Post, the Obama administration on Monday once again paid lip service to one of its less noted but more dumb ideas. They would like to shuffle teachers around. This is not a new thing-- I wrote about it last December:

Back in 2012, the USDOE published "Providing Effective Teachers for All Students" The most obvious focus of the report is on methods of assessing teacher effectiveness, with all the usual suspects in play. But this case study of five districts also considers what to do with the ratings once they've been manufactured ...er, I mean, tabulated with totally reliable data.

One of the ideas is, basically, to make your certified crappy teachers and your certified excellent teachers trade places. This is a stupid idea for many reasons, starting with the fact that we still don't have any useful way of identifying excellent (or not-so-excellent) teachers. So instead of trying to solve that riddle, states are declaring, as required by the Department of Education's NCLB/RTTT-fueled extortion waiver, that teachers will be evaluated at least in part based on standardized test results. Of course, we also know that poverty and poorly funded schools leaded inexorably to low standardized test results, so voila!-- teachers working in high poverty schools are far more likely to be teaching low-score students, and therefor far more likely to be "discovered" to be less excellent teachers. It's not that our most struggling students don't deserve excellent teachers-- it's that we don't have any real reason to believe that many of those excellent teachers are not already there.

I have explained this before. If you remove the roof from a classroom, whoever is in the classroom will get wet when it rains. If you say, "Hey, this teacher is all wet-- send me another one," it will make no difference. When the new teacher arrives, she will get wet, too.

You cannot improve this situation with threats. If you say, "Hey! The next wet teacher I find in this room is gonna get fired!" you will not get miraculously dry teachers standing in the rain. What you will get are teachers who want to keep their jobs saying, "No, I am NOT going to go teach in the roofless room, thankyouverymuch." And your roofless wet room will be occupied primarily by young teachers who didn't have other options or who believe that they'll be kept dry by their youth and enthusiasm and job offers from hedge funds for after they've finished.

This seems so obvious and yet clearly it isn't-- creating extra performance pressure without addressing the root causes of poor student performance absolutely guarantees to do the OPPOSITE of recruiting teachers to those situations. "Don't you want to come here and risk your teaching career in difficult wet room with no support" is NOT a great recruiting line.

However, the Ed Department occasionally notices that No Child Left Behind (which is still actually the law governing education, as opposed to the pseudo-laws of Race to the Top waivers) requires every state to have an equity plan-- a plan for how we're going to shuffle around those teachers to get the great ones in the wet rooms.

The rest of why this law is stupid is because nobody knows how to do it. When it comes to moving excellent teachers to low-performing classrooms, there are only a few possibilities:

Guilt trip: Your nation needs you. It's the right thing to do. There is no more important work in our country today. On the one hand, this has the advantage of being related to actual truth. On the other hand, it is a challenge for state and federal education officials to convey that they actually believe any of it. Nevertheless, their best bet is probably to convince teachers to take one for the team.

Bribery: Offer them obscene amounts of money to do it. And I mean pro football obscene. This actually makes sense. We pay pro athletes huge amounts of money because they are basically drawing their entire career salary in a few years, because their careers will probably be over by the time they're thirty. Same thing here. If we're going to ask teachers to work in career-ending classrooms, let's pay them their entire career salary for it. But I'll go cheap-- let's say $350,000 a year. The problem, of course, is that reformsters want to pay most teachers less rather than more.

Extortion: Pull teacher credentials at random and tell them they have to teach in low performing schools or else they will lose their teaching certification (Massachusetts got confused and is proposing the reverse-- teach at a low-performing school and then we'll take your certificate.)

Trickery: Tell teachers they've won a trip to Bermuda or Alaska or that nice farm where families send their very old dogs. When they discover they've actually ended up in a low-performance school, it will be too late.

Rendering: Wait outside a teacher's classroom. Tie a bag over her head and throw her in a van. Easy peasy. If anybody asks questions, just explain that she moved to that nice farm where families send their very old dogs.

There may also be a possibility of implementing indentured servitude, but essentially the law and every succeeding administration to work under it is forced to depend on wishful thinking and hopeful thoughts to implement the Great Educator Shift. 

Fortunately, nobody is really asking states to actually do anything. There is a deadline for submitting a plan, but no requirement that the plan be actually feasible, nor any requirement that said plan actually be implemented.

Michael Petrilli gets the quote-of-the-day award. "This is a nothing-burger," said the president of the Fordham Institute. Which I think pretty much nails it, except that not only can we not find the beef, but I'm pretty sure there's no bun, though there is plenty of cheese.

Clarifying the Ohio Situation (Or Not)

In today's cleveland.com, Tom Gunlock, Ohio State Board or Education vice chairman, tells everyone to simmer down on the Ohio elementary schools specialist flap.

First, the date of the vote, as reported by various sources, including me, is incorrect. That vote will not take place until December.

That's the good news. The bad news is that the essence of the story I reported is correct.

The state board will vote in December, not this week as some have claimed, on whether to eliminate requirements that local districts have a certain number of elementary art, music or physical education teachers, school counselors, library media specialists, school nurses, social workers and "visiting teachers."

Administrative code requires districts to have at least five of these eight positions per 1,000 students in what some call the "5 of 8" rule. The state board is considering wiping out that rule and allowing districts to make staffing decisions on their own.

Tom Gunlock, the board's vice chairman, said this morning that the proposed change isn't to eliminate those positions, as some are charging, but to let districts make their own choices.

What I reported, with others, is that the state is considering removing the requirement for those positions. Gunlock confirms that. What we now have is a rationale for it, and the rationale appears to be "local control."

"For years, people have been telling me about all these unfunded mandates and that we're telling them what to do. They keep telling me they know more about what their kids need that we do, and I agree with them."

It seems that arts and phys ed are still on the table, though I agree with other commentators that he school code seems to preserve those disciplines elsewhere (though maybe not with teachers certified in those areas). Wish I was a bit more familiar with Ohio school law.

But per this article, it is true that the state is not actually going to eliminate those positions. It's just going to give the green light to any local district that decides they want to eliminate those positions. Because there are so many parents and districts out there saying, "Dammit, our children don't need a librarian or phys ed or a nurse-- why the hell does the state force us to hire these people??" 

Gunlock says that the noise yesterday was blown out of proportion, and it is true that anybody who said that the state was going to eliminate those positions would have been over-reacting. Did anybody think that the state was going to say "There can be no arts, phys ed, etc positions in elementary schools"? No? Didn't think so.

No, the early buzz was correct. The state board would like to eliminate the requirement for those positions, leaving any local district free to eliminate some or all of them. Let me just quote me:

Who does this? Who jumps up and says, "You know what our students need? Less! Our students need less! Let's take a stand and do what we can to make it easier to give them less!" Who the hell does that? Apparently the Ohio State Board of Education does that. Tell them it's not okay.

The other takeaway from this article is that yesterday's commotion was enough to either make the newspaper say, "Gee, we should cover this" or (my vote goes to this one) the Ohio State Board call a newpaper contact to say, "Hey, we need some help getting a response out to this." Either way, the internet rumblings were felt.

You have a month to make some more noise, Ohio. Don't waste it. And let me repost this:

Every Teacher Should Be Bad at Something

Like most teachers, I've worked at a variety of side jobs, from radio dj to musician to newspaper columnist. But I may have learned the most from my time at a catalog order call center.

This was not one of those cold call phone banks, but a call center where customers called us to place their orders. Our job was to get the ordered placed as quickly and pleasantly as possible, then provide them with a few opportunities for further purchases at the end of the call. Our job was to try to get them to pick up another item or two, and then "while their order was processing" (it was all on computer-- we were already looking right at it) try to sell them either a shop-with-us club membership kind of thing, or a kind of medical supplemental insurance. I worked at the job a full summer and through many months part-time thereafter.

I was not good at this job. I was bad at this job. I was punctual and never missed a shift, which they liked, but I was a terrible salesman.

Now, I'm not a master of any of the trades I've messed with. I'm an okay musician, a passable writer, a fair-to-middlin' radio guy-- the list of things that I can do well enough goes on and on (nor am I by any stretch of the imagination the best teacher in my building). But I had never done a job before at which I was just plain not good.

It wasn't long before I noticed how Being Bad was affecting me.

I came to dread being there, walking through the door, driving the car to work. While there, I wanted to be somewhere else. There can be big down time between calls; rather than just sit and soak in the place, I would throw myself into reading. Any distraction-- a chatty caller, an entertaining co-worker-- was consuming. I would negotiate deals between myself, my bladder and the clock (forty-five more minutes and I will go pee).

Part of my brain just wanted to somehow discount the whole experience, to come up with ways to dismiss what I was doing so that my failure was somehow proof that I was smarter or better or cooler or just generally above this. If I could treat it as a ridiculous joke of a job, the fact that I wasn't any good at it wouldn't matter. If I could find flaws in the people who were long-time successful employees, then I wouldn't have to feel bad about myself. A part of my brain dropped whatever it usually did and devoted itself full time to creating excuses, both macro and micro, and another portion started working full time on odd routines just to give me back some sense of control over y situation. A part of my brain was doing anything it could to avoid reaching an unwelcome conclusion about myself based on my apparent inability to succeed at a seemingly simple task. A part of my brain worked on telling me reasons it just didn't matter that I wasn't good at this-- after all, the real part of my real life was outside the company's four walls. I knew I was a perfectly capable, intelligent human being with a useful array of talents-- but none of them were doing me any good and it was hard to not frame my mismatch for the job as a deficit on my part.

After a while, I became used to failing. When the screen popped up that held my script for selling the club membership, I would flinch and just try to get through to the moment when the customer would reject my offer and we could move on. The more I failed, the more it was impossible to imagine anything but failure, and the more I envisioned failure, the more I wanted to avoid entering that wrestling match with the job that I just knew I would lose.

My employers were great. I was gently coached, pleasantly directed, and given encouragement. It did not help.

There is just a spiritually corrosive quality to having to go back, day after day after day, and throw yourself into something that you aren't very good at. Yes, I'm sure I could have grabbed my bootstraps or sucked up my testicular fortitude or put my head down and driven through--and I knew that, and the fact that I couldn't do any of that just became one more badge of failure in the job.

However, the whole experience did have one useful aspect, because I realized right off the bat who also dealt regularly with feelings like mine.

My students.

This is why I now say that all teachers should not only get a job outside of school, but also have the experience of being bad at something.

My lower functioning students have to get up every day and go to a place where all day long, they are required to do things that they are bad at. They have to carry the feelings that go with that, the steady toxic buildup that goes with constantly wrestling with what they can't do, the endless drip-drip-drip of that inadequacy-based acid on the soul.

It's up to us to remind them that they are good at things. It's up to us to make a commitment to get them to a place of success. It's up to us NOT to hammer home what they already know-- that there are tasks they aren't very good at completing.

I don't know how much longer the company would have tolerated my low bonus sale numbers, but my lack of scheduling availability was enough to end my phone career. That's okay. The extra money was nice, and I have no doubt that being a bad telemarketer made me a better teacher. And I have some great stories (you have not lived until you have helped a little old lady order a personal intimate massage device by phone), but I will save those for another day.

[More Update] Ohio Gunning for Specialists

My first teaching job was in Ohio (Lorain High School); I have some fondness for our nearby neighbors. So it has been alarming to watch Ohio transform fairly rapidly into a state that is openly hostile to public education and public school teachers.

This morning comes word that the Ohio State Board of Education will vote this Tuesday [ per this article on cleveland.com ], the vote will come in December] today on some revision to the school code. The most significant revision reportedly under consideration is one that would end state requirements for elementary specialists. [I've written a reaction to the new article over here]

Currently, school code states that for every thousand elementary students, schools must have in place five of the following eight specialists: art, music, counselor, school nurse, librarian/media specialist, visiting teacher, social worker, or phys ed.

The revision would eliminate the section that includes that language. What would be left is this definition of staff:

Educational service personnel are credentialed staff with the knowledge, skills and expertise to support the educational, instructional, health, mental health, and college/career readiness needs of students.

The appeal for districts is obvious. Let's have one music teacher for 10,000 students. Let's have no music teacher at all. Great. Let me mention that this article also came across my screen this morning: "Youngstown kids second poorest in nation" Do we really need to argue that the poorest, most vulnerable students are the ones who most need these sorts of services and enrichment? Is there somebody in Ohio prepared, seriously, to argue that nurses and music and art and phys ed are unnecessary luxuries, and kids should just pack up their grit and do without?

I would love to tell you more about this, like what the justification for the move might actually be (other than giving districts more leeway to slash personnel), but the whole business appears to be occurring with a double helping of speed and stealth. There's a slide presentation about the move available here and that comes with contact information. The issue is burning up twitter under the hashtag #ohio5of8.

So take some time to fire off emails, hit the twitter, do what you can to, at least, make some noise so that folks in Ohio see what's happening, because then maybe they'll make some noise and maybe the Ohio Board will think twice before making this stupid move.

Who does this? Who jumps up and says, "You know what our students need? Less! Our students need less! Let's take a stand and do what we can to make it easier to give them less!" Who the hell does that? Apparently the Ohio State Board of Education does that. Tell them it's not okay.

[Update:

I heard this evening from Greg at Plunderbund, an Ohio-focused site. Greg had a couple of observations to make that are perhaps good news for a portion of this issue, but still troubling for others. His reading of the code is that the arts and phys ed are not in danger, but the same may not be true for the other support services

If you look on page 108 of the Board Book, Volume 5 (ftp://ftp.ode.state.oh.us/ODEMediaWeb/State_Board_Board_Books/November_2014/Board%20Book%20Vol%205%20Nov%202014.pdf), you'll see that it still requires that all curriculum required by Ohio Revised Code shall still be provided by school districts.

As such, if you then look at ORC 3313.60 (http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/3313.60), you'll see that physical education and the arts are explicitly required.

In addition, earlier in the changes to OAC (page 99 of the Board Book), it does clearly define all of the "Educational Service Personnel".

Now, something to look into is the issue of nurses, counselors, social workers and the possible impact of these changes on those positions.  I haven't had time to research the other requirements for those roles in our schools.  Focusing research on these jobs might be more important than looking at the arts & phys ed. which are not going anywhere.

[More update: Per the cleveland.com article, the board's vice-chairman says that the board is not eliminating the positions. They're just saying that local schools don't have to have them.]

[Update: Here's a handy guide to names, regions, and emails for board members