Gralike’s departure to leave a void on Mehlville board

Your Call

By Daniel S. Fowler

The Mehlville School District soon will lose one of the best members ever to sit on the Board of Education.

David Gralike has decided after serving two terms as a board member not to seek election to another three-year term.

Mr. Gralike leaves behind a great legacy of accomplishments for which he was di-rectly responsible. Mr. Gralike is one of the few board members who has done what he said he would do when seeking office.

He was president of the Board of Edu-cation when he formed the Citizens’ Ad-visory Committee for Facilities to evaluate Mehlville’s needs that subsequently re-sulted in the passage of Proposition P, the largest building improvement program ever approved by voters in Mehlville’s history. As a result, the Mehlville School Dis-trict is blessed with some of the finest fa-cilities in all of St. Louis County.

During his tenure on the board, he worked to end activity fees that he believed were unfair in a public school system. Mr. Gralike also had the courage to vote “no” on excessive administrative pay raises.

Shortly after being elected to the board in 1997, he sought and obtained an opinion from Attorney General Jay Nixon that the vote of each school board member must be made available to the public on votes taken in a closed session to hire, fire, discipline or promote employees.

A few years later, the state’s Open Meet-ings and Records Law was amended to re-quire that any votes taken during a closed session must be roll-call votes.

As he ends his service on the board, Mr. Gralike is pushing hard for the end of Mehlville’s participation in the voluntary transfer student program and a return to neighborhood schools.

Most importantly, David Gralike is the last board member since Alex Lantos to represent and know the needs of working men and women employed by Mehlville.

Many of our current school board members do not have the ability to separate their fiduciary responsibilities to school districttaxpayers from the friendships they have developed with Central Office administrators.

This has never been a problem for Mr. Gralike, who never hesitated to ask tough questions that probed how decisions were made and, when necessary, challenged those decisions.

Mehlville’s Central Office administrators are very trustworthy and competent, but board members must be able to separate the business side of running a school district from their friendships with administrators to effectively perform their sworn duties.

The real question is that with Dave Gra-like gone, who will take his place in holding district administrators accountable?

Certainly the remaining members of the board have demonstrated an appalling lack of interest in doing this.

While board members must trust administrators to do the right thing, verifying administrators’ spending and decision-making is their primary responsibility.

As Ronald Reagan used to say: “Trust but verify.”

The Mehlville Board of Education has a long history of members who could be counted on to separate their fiduciary re-sponsibilities from their friendships with administrators, including Bob Handrahan, Alex Lantos, Kurt Witzel, John Mikolay, Dick Roehl and Chuck Van Gronigen.

In fact, Kurt Witzel would not go out for drinks with board members and administrators after meetings because he believed it was inappropriate. In hindsight, he was right.

Two new board members will be elected April 8 to replace Mr. Gralike and Walt Bivins, who also chose not to run again.

The likely winners of that election will be Bill Schornheuser Jr. and Mike Heins, the only two candidates running active cam-paigns.

Their answers to questions posed at a recent forum did not offer much hope that either one of them will be able to fill Mr. Gralike’s shoes. Instead, we will see short board meetings, as we have started to see in the recent past, few probing questions asked and no real decisions made by board members.

Worse, board members will leave the im-portant decisions to Central Office administrators so they can quickly retreat to a local watering hole for their social gatherings after meetings.

Some day this way of doing business is going to come back and bite the board – unfortunately at the expense of we the taxpayers. We already can see some signs of this happening, so stay tuned.

It is the voting taxpayers of the district who have the last call. I hope we will see David Gralike back in the future serving our community with distinction in some other capacity.

Daniel S. Fowler, who served three terms on the Mehlville Board of Educa-tion, was chairman of both the Citizens’ Advisory Committee for Facilities and the Citizens to Protect Our Investment.