Please note this is for a renewal of a Gamut Online Contract with CSBA. Gamut is an acronym for Governments and Management Using Technology. It is a service from CSBA that helps create the school's policies 1000 through 6000, that had been blindly voted on by the Board, with at best a cursory read, and that have never been disclosed to the community.
When a number of the community members raised questions about what the policies said, after numerous complaints, they were given copies of the new policies that are based on CSBA templates with changes made in secret and invisible in the final version by Dr. Wagner.
Dr. Wagner ignored the fact that the GAMUT contract allows unlimited passwords for the district's staff and Board members to access the original policies online.
It also allows the district to have a public account giving parents and other community members unlimited access to the district's final policy manual without charge, but only after every policy has been approved.
The method is a cumbersome one where the district prints out the template policy and manually marks up the changes and sends them back to CSBA manually. CSBA then types the changes into their computer and then resends them to the district in paper form. CSBA has all of the changed policies in their computer and can provide these in electronic form if the district requests them.
In a conversation with CSBA, it is unclear whether this paper method is all they offer or simply the method requested by Dr. Wagner. The CSBA technician who can provide more answers won't return until September 8th.
Dr. Wagner has not requested the files in electronic form to give the public access to the finished policies. The Board cannot get access to the finished policies or to the policies in progress that show Wagner's changes from the CSBA templates.
To get around this serious violation of the Brown Act, she took the paper data from the CSBA site and then had district personnel scan the pages as an image instead of getting the file from CSBA and load the images on the school website. Note, these images of the text pages occupy as much as 10 times the size of the original text files. The images are neither scalable nor readable for sight-impaired persons, as federal law under ADA Section 508 requires. Further, they are not copyable so someone offering testimony cannot present the original, showing proposed changes, but are reduced to making hand written notes on paper.
The fact that Dr. Wagner wasted all this time by scanning, and posting the nearly unreadable files gives new meaning to “hide in plain sight”. It is just plain obnoxious when a government agent spends the peoples' money to hide information from the people. One has to conclude that she just doesn't know how to do anything correctly, which getting free help from the community can solve, or that it is her intention to hide this information from the community.
I have included copies of the appropriate data from the CSBA website.
Q. What does GAMUT™ stand for? A. GAMUT™ is an acronym for Governance And Management Using Technology.
Do you ever have trouble locating a policy on a particular topic? Do you find Education Code research to be a time consuming and frustrating task? With GAMUT™, just a click of the mouse provides board members and district staff easy access to the information needed to govern and manage effectively. GAMUT™ is a computerized policy information service, incorporating the complete CSBA Policy Update Reference Manual - more than 800 sample policies, regulations and exhibits. GAMUT™ is available online with continuous updates or on CD with updated CDs issued 3 times a year. Easy access. Policies can be retrieved by code number or keyword listing and then exported to a text or RTF file that may be opened in the user's word processing application for easy editing. In addition, the "find" button allows users to search policies for specific words and phrases. Legal and management resources. Policies are linked to legal resources. This enables users to move between a policy and its legal citations. For example, clicking on the phrase "Education Code 48915" in a sample regulation, brings up that particular section of the Education Code. Subscription Fee: Based on ADA. Call for a fee schedule.
http://www.csba.org/gamut/online_manual.htm Allows an unlimited number of user accounts for district staff and board members to access GAMUT Online.
Allows the district to have a “public account” to give Internet access to the district's policy manual to parents and others. The “public account” is a limited account giving access to only the district's policy manual. Links to Education Code, other laws and other districts are not available.