Attacks Against Director Berg

At the October 20, 2021 Board meeting, Director Berg was elected Board President by a vote of 3 to 1 to fill the unexpired term of Eric Gattenby, who had resigned from the Board in September.   Director Daily spoke  against Director Berg being elected Board President.

Director Diehl questioned whether or not such personally directed remarks were out of order, but the chair (Director Berg as acting president at the time) stated that they normally would be out of order but since the pending question was the election of board president, debate of the candidate's qualifications would be permitted.

(It is interesting to note that when Director Diehl raised her parliamentary inquiry, Director Berg stopped to make sure that Director Daily had concluded his remarks first.  This was an application of Robert's Rules to protect Director Daily's rights to not be interrupted when he had the floor.)

The full extent of Director Daily's remarks can be found on the video of the meeting at 2:24:25 into the meeting.  Below is a summary of Director Daily's major points, together with Director Berg's responses.  In order to avoid contention in the Board meeting, Director Berg did not respond to the remarks at the meeting.  

Director Daily stated that Director Berg, at a prior Board meeting, called the police on a parent without first working with the parent's concerns and just shut down the meeting, thus displaying poor leadership skills.

The incident referred to occurred at the September 15, 2021 Board meeting and can be viewed on the video of the meeting at timepoint 0:21:45.  Director Berg was presiding in the absence of Director Gattenby.  There had been a rally at Bethel and Lund prior to the Board meeting to protest the State's mask mandate and the District's enforcment of it.  Similar to the incident last January 6th in the other Washington, those at the rally were encouraged to attend the Board meeting to make their voices heard.  That similarity may have contributed to the fears of those at the Board meeting.

All of the visitor seats in the Board room were filled and more chairs were being set up as visitors continued to arrive after the meeting had started.

There were two signs before reaching the outside door instructing visitors that they must be masked to attend the meeting. District security personnel were also on hand in the hallway to remind visitors to mask.  Most of the visitors complied.

About twenty minutes into the meeting additional people entered the room unmasked.  Director Berg informed them them that under District policy they must be masked or leave the meeting.  One of the unmasked individuals who refused to comply approached the Board to protest the mask policy.  Director Berg reminded him that this was not the public comment portion of the meeting and asked him to be silent and mask himself or leave the room.  

The crowd became very vocal and Director Berg  told the individual that if he did not leave the room law enforcement would be summoned.  Director Berg recessed the meeting to restore order.  The situation did not improve.  Superintendent Winter and Director Diehl left the room with the two student board representatives.  At that point the board no longer had the required quorum of three directors present to conduct business and Director Berg adjourned the meeting for lack of a quorum.

Director Berg is personally sympathetic with those who oppose mask and vaccine requirements, including members of his immediate family who fall in those categories.  Nevertheless, when presiding at a board meeting, he must put his personal feelings aside and enforce District policy.  The South Kitsap School District, as does every other school district, has policies that all who enter upon district property must comply with, particularly when students are present.  When individuals are upon district property in violation of district policy, they are trespassing and must leave.

The Washington Open Public Meeting act provides for situations in which it becomes necessary to recess or adjourn a meeting when it becomes unruly. 

Director Daily is referring to this website, www.skschools.info.  Viewers of this website can determine for themselves if the primary purpose of the website is to attack Director Daily, and if so, is it justified.

Director Daily claimed that the website violated numerous ethical, board policies, and laws, but cited none.

The purpose of this website is to inform stakeholders about the workings of the South Kitsap School District and particularly its Board.  Since his election to the Board, Director Daily has had a significant influence on the workings of the board, and such influence is reported accurately and without personal attacks, name-calling, photoshopped images of him, nor ridicule.  The facts are presented so that they can speak for themselves.  Even value-laden adjectives are avoided on this website. 

Most comments received about this website are quite positive.  Only two people have criticized this website as being biased or inaccurate, and they are both mentioned in the next paragraph.  In spite of their repeated accusations of falsehoods on this website, they have failed to even identify, much less prove, any false statements.

Compare this website with that of Citizens Supporting South Kitsap Schools (CSSKS), of which Director Daily and Mr. David Kimble are principals.  As of this writing, seven out of the last eight articles on that website have attacked Director Berg, calling him names such as "Our Idiot of the Month",  "Cowboy Parliamentarian", "King Crybaby J. Berg", and referring to "John Berg's Stinky Mess".  Photoshopped images of Director Berg are presented, together with other offensive images.  

This website contains no such attacks.

The document to which Director Daily refers was actually only 70-pages, not 80.  (Director Daily's term "manifesto" is what it is called on the abovementioned CSSKS website.) While Director Daily portrays the document as a personal attack on his character, the document was actually Director Berg's reply to the extensive accusations that Director Daily leveled against Director Berg at the April 21, 2021 meeting.  The document consists of 15 pages or narrative, addressing the accusations line-by-line, followed by 55 pages of exhibits in support of the narrative.

Director Berg's narrative pointed out what he believed were inaccuracies, contradictions, and inconsistencies in Director Daily's accusations. 

The document was distributed to the Board and posted on this website.  It was not "sent to everyone in the community" as claimed by Director Daily, unless posting something on a personal website constitutes sending it to everyone in the community.

The lawsuit to which Director Daily refers is Jeffery Daily v. South Kitsap School Board [1].  The Board was sued, not the individual members.  There is a legal distinction between suing a board as an entity rather than suing its individual members.  Director Daily also stated that there are also personal lawsuits against the directors which they will need to deal with. At that time, there was only the one lawsuit, and there are no lawsuits pending against individual Board members.

Director Daily sued the Board to appeal its July 19, 2021 decision to not adopt his motion to have an outside investigation of two other Board members (Directors Gattenby and Sebren).  The Board voted 1 to 3 against his motion, yet Director Daily blames Director Berg for the Board's decision and for Director Daily's own decision to sue the Board.

After the incident at the September 15th Board meeting discussed above, Director Berg, then as acting board president after the resignation of Director Gattenby, felt it best to follow the lead of other districts with similar problems and go back to holding meetings 100% on Zoom.  

His primary reason was not the COVID-19 infection rate, but for crowd control and the safety of the participants.  The current Board meeting room is not large enough to hold large crowds and simply having enough visitors show up to exceed the legal capacity of the room would force the meeting to shut down.  Moving the meetings to the high school auditorium was tried in July, but the logistics made it less practical.  The rights to view the meetings and make public comment were retained in the Zoom meetings.

Director Berg initially proposed the agenda for the October 6th meeting as a 100% Zoom meeting.  Director Daily protested that decision and a special meeting of the Board was held on October 5th, via Zoom, and the majority decided to have future meeting 100% Zoom until the Board determined otherwise.  This was a board decision by majority vote, and not Director Berg imposing his will on the Board.

"In summary, your arrogance, cowardice, desire for political gain, vindictiveness, regardless of what you think, are not the characteristics of any leadership model I am familiar with.  Your ethical morals, and integrity basically disgust me.  You're sitting there, interpreting Robert's Rules of Order as Robert's Rules of Order for John Berg.  Many of those are your interpretations.  They can be interpreted and they are written otherwise.  So you're not qualified for the job."

Director Daily has claimed that Director's Berg's application of Robert's Rules of Order were Director Berg's own incorrect interpretations.  Yet Director Daily has provided no examples of any errors in Director Berg's application of parliamentary rules and has provided none in the past.  It should be very simple to point to some specific instance and then cite the appropriate provision in Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised (12th ed.) to show where Director Berg was in error.

The CSSKD, through Larry Mann, filed ethical complaints with the National Association of Parliamentarians (NAP) against Director Berg, echoing Director Daily's claims that Director Berg was mis-applying parliamentary procedure.  Those accusations were dismissed by the NAP's Professional Standards Committee.

Director Berg holds the highest credential for parliamentarians granted by the National Association of Parliamentarians, that of Professional Registered Parliamentarian, or PRP.  A PRP is also trained, tested, and qualified to serve as a presiding officer.  Director Berg has had over fifteen educational articles published in the journals of the National Association of Parliamentarians or the American Institute of Parliamentarians.  He has served on the NAP Edit and Review Committee reviewing submitted articles from other parliamentarians for publication in the journal. He has taught workshops at the NAP national training conferences or convention in 2021, 2019 and 2018.  He will be presenting a breakout session on Robert's Rules for other school board directors in the state at the Washington State School Directors' Association meeting in November.

He served four years as the president of the Washington State Association of Parliamentarians (WSAP) and has served as parliamentarian for a number of national organizations.  Including being president of the WSAP, he has served a total of fourteen years as president of state-wide organizations (some concurrently). 

By contrast, Director Daily's understanding and respect of parliamentary procedure is characterized by his criticizing the motion to end debate, one of the basic motions in parliamentary procedure, as "Robert's Rules Hocus Pocus" at the October 6, 2021 Board meeting.