BASIS DC shut down/abolished the school list serve
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Anonymous
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I find this unbelievable. Yes, the rules were too detailed and people complained to moderators and the Board about stupid things, people were put on moderated status for stupid reasons, and some posts were inappropriate - it was too time consuming for them any time an issue blew up and made people hostile to the BOOSTERS in general for no other reason - it makes sense for the BOOSTERS (kind of the equivalent of a PTA but not, because all they do is raise money for the Annual Teacher Fund, without having any say or clue in where our money goes and how it is distributed - like the school, NO financial transparency at all) to get out of the business.
But they are not leaving the list serve intact. UNBELIEVABLE BUT TRUE - TRY POSTING TO THE BASIS LIST SERVE - YOU CANNOT. PERIOD. IT IS GONE. WHOEVER MADE THIS DECISION NOT ONLY DECIDED TO GET OUT OF THE BUSINESS OF MODERATING IT - WHICH WAS A STUPID IDEA IN THE FIRST PLACE, BUT DECIDED TO DESTROY IT. They ended their frigging newsletter with the numerous other ways parents can stay in touch with each other They neglected to tell us that there is no longer a way to get in touch with the entire school, the whole community The place where numerous people posted, to every member of the school community who had signed up to get the emails, about scholarships, competitions, conferences, opportunities for additional intellectual stimulation for all of our children, all this outside STEM related stuff that no one person could possibly have had a line on, and new ones crop up every year, letting everyone in the community know........ is no longer, and there is no substitute. We were just talking about a way to kind of establish a calendar for the annual scholarship, competition, and conference opportunities when suddenly........... you cannot. We had an awesome kid enter a fun competition which might have won Basis DC $30k, and all the voting was on line. And this was the way he and his mother put the word out - watch the video, vote for my son, you can vote once a day from different places from date x to date y. Even if we did not win it, a lot of Basis parents tried to, and a lot of us had fun showing our children the video the child made to enter the competition which was sponsored by Uncle Ben's Rice. He made a lettuce wrap, with panache, enthusiasm, and overall cuteness. We will never have that opportunity again. I guess they owned the list serve, having established it. WHO EXACTLY MADE THIS DECISION - NOT TO NO LONGER MODERATE IT, BUT TO DESTROY IT? When we come from all over the city, most of our kids had never met each other before 5th grade............ They published a directory, which is indeed useful, but really? The place where parents asked for missing or misunderstood homework assignments and were usually responded to with information, even sometimes scanned notes for classes missed, etc. We are not Washington Latin. We have no Wikis. If a child writes down an assignment incorrectly, or is confused, the only thing you can do now is email particular parents, or email your child's teacher........... revealing at the least your identity, maybe your child's sloppiness, what have you. There is a reason we were not bothering the teachers, and for the most part, requests for help were met with information and cooperation. That was a new thing this year, and it was community building. NOW YOU CANNOT POST A QUESTION. YOU CANNOT PROVIDE AN ANSWER. WTF? THE ONLY THING THEY DID NOT DO IS ERASE ALL PRIOR CORRESPONDENCE ON THE LIST SERVE. AND THEY BETTER NOT. I AM TO SAY THE LEAST EXTREMELY DISILLUSIONED WITH THE DECISION MAKERS HERE - They could have just said "we are out of the moderating business, we understand it is a useful resource, in addition to the catfights (which will now be fought here, in front of everyone), so we are going to leave you all to your own devices, a fairly responsible group of adults, to stay in touch with the community here, to ask questions, to post opportunities... There was a gigantic dispute a few weeks ago because you are not supposed to post about politics, and someone posted about an at large candidate who proclaims from the rooftops that he does not support charter schools. But that was too political for some tender sensibilities - not an endorsement of another candidate, just a heads up about this one. I do not have the words to express how outraged I am. Yes they owned it, but they could have just handed it over to the community, and if people fight, they fight. If they want to post about UFOs let them do it. But not allowing anyone to post anything at all, ever again? THAT WAS THE WRONG DECISION I URGE EVERY BASIS PARENT TO FIND OUT PRECISELY WHO IS RESPONSIBLE AND IRRITATE THEM TO NO END BECAUSE I AM SURE IT WAS NOT DESTROYED, IT WAS DISABLED IT PROBABLY TAKES THE PUSH OF A KEY BUTTON AND ALL THE SUBSCRIBERS WILL ONCE AGAIN BE ABLE TO SPEAK TO EACH OTHER Almost everyone here probably participates in a neighborhood list serve. I do. While there is sometimes the same amount of stupidity and pettiness it is a way to keep your hand on the pulse of the neighborhood, and a source of information even if some of it is misinformation. But why not let Basis parents sort that out for themselves? Now we are supposed to raise issues with the BOOSTERS and they may or may not announce them in their weekly newsletter, and may or may not ask the administration and provide answers to the community. Because now they and the school own the ability to communicate with a group of interested parents from all grades. So they can set the agendas, and if your issue is vetoed the community will never know you raised it in the first place. |
Anonymous
| I heard they blocked it due to excessive use of capital letters. |
Anonymous
HA Ha ha. That would be funny if they had not just destroyed, to give an example, the way parents find a group of people remotely in their neighborhood to privately fund buses to get their ten year olds from wherever to Basis. They usually post an area, and last year we were on a waitlist. Ironically, almost no one posting on the Basis list serve uses capital letters to make their points. Less ironic, but no less true, is that they have just destroyed the only way Basis parents had to share information school wide. NOW (and yes, I did, and I do not apologize) THAT raises some serious issues about censorship writ large, not parents being "moderated" on the list serve itself. They created this space so that parents who will never meet on playgrounds and are unlikely to meet anywhere else (sorry, but volunteering to be the tool of the administration where I tell parents that they need to give money but I have no idea how it will be spent, or volunteering for the gala/auction planning are not high on my to-do list), could share items of interest or issues that they thought concerned the ENTIRE Basis community. Why couldn't they just have left it in place? Even if it were to become the tower of Babel, and useless. Is it if we, the Boosters and the administration cannot have it - because we cannot control it (meaning it has become too complicated to manage parent complaints and our arbitrary detailed rules requiring censoring on the list serve) we will not allow anyone else to have it, to use as a vehicle for anyone else to attempt to communicate with the entire school. That is a BOOSTERS right. We send out the emails (because of course we already have all the addresses), we decide what gets raised with the administration, or if not, how we will report it........ Did the Boosters give an account of what was discussed at the first informal "coffee hour?" NO WAY We don't want to report complaints about violence and bullying in the halls during the 5 minutes students are allowed to move from class to class, we don't want to report complaints raised by parents about anything. We don't want to report the issue of how difficult it was for parents whose children had failed the comps, who risked being held back, to get access to the comp they failed, much less report a request for summer school, for some kind of help for these kids. And we don't want parents to have a way to figure out if their experience is a "their child issue" or a Basis DC issue. We are the ones who will now decide that exclusively, because we report on what happens at our meetings, and perhaps omit the inconvenient questions raised by parents like any issue concerning violence because it has gotten so so so much better in the last three years that in our esteemed opinion, the only opinion that now will be heard by the entire Basis community who have to work and cannot attend morning coffees, will be our opinion, our version of what was raised at meetings, our decisions on what meetings to report on.... |
Anonymous
| Why don't you parents just start a yahoo group? You have freedom of speech. The school can't stop you. |
Anonymous
Because the OP wont be ABLE TO COMPLAIN. Why SOLVE A PROBLEM and TAKE RESPONSIBILITY when he/she can BLAME someone else. |
Anonymous
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Please remember that the same people who made this decision are the ones asking for money for the ATF, even though they have no idea how it is going to be spent.
Please do not donate to the ATF' I don't know anything about a yahoo group, but presumably you have to have all the email addresses, which the moderator collected and typed in laboriously once already........ And which anyone starting a yahoo group will not have. Basis parents are busy. Vote with your pocketbooks please. Do NOT donate to the ATF given that the same people who shut down the list serve are trying to get the money from you. Did anyone ever tell us how much the ATF made last year? |
Anonymous
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Not that uncommon. Watkins shut theirs down. If you hate the school so much that you need to connect with others to bash it- then you should not be there.
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Anonymous
OH NO! It's her again...... |
Anonymous
| If there were messages similar to OP's, I understand the decision. We had to deactivate our condo listserve a few years back because of two abusers. So unfair to everyone else, but it became necessary. |
Anonymous
| I actually think smaller grouped list serves work better. Maybe parents could set up list serves by grade or neighborhood. If you have a fifth grader you really don't need or want to be reading emails about prom. Or if you live in Georgetown you don't really want to hear that the bus was late coming from Capitol Hill. |
Anonymous
Sorry I am OP it was 3am and I was off the rails. But I am really, truly upset. For every ONE negative or off the wall post (and of course that is in the eye of the beholder) there were 30 that helped fellow parents - people posted articles about education, competitions, STEM conferences for girls........ I guess I can't explain it. But it is very easy to ignore posts there from people you don't like b/c you see their name. Here, not so much. But "ownership of the list serve" means nothing to me - they ought to have thought about the community building aspects that were going on, and they ought to have left us to our own devices. In some ways it was useless - you could not mention a teacher or administrator by name and say critical things about them, and that is just plain wrong because they fire teachers at the end of every year, and classroom management is a big issue for some teachers and if someone just flagged it early on maybe they could regain control........ We are not a condo. We are a school in its 3rd year, with growing pains, and so many shifts in terms of who is running things and how they are being run it would boggle your mind. We have the potential to be great, and honestly, the list serve was a part of that. Why couldn't they just have let people who are Word Salads have their say, knowing that no one listens or cares, and let the rest of us use the list serve as a resource. There was no notice. There was a stupid double speak explanation. And now the only way to raise a question or concern is either to go to their stupid meetings, trust them to do it for you, or go in the morning and hope the administration will answer your question and that not everyone else knows the answer - because when a simple email could have cleared it up, valuable time has been wasted. This just feels like Orwell's 1984, throwing the baby out with the bath water. Why not just let the baby get adopted? Seriously, this was a terrible call and there is no way they are getting a cent from me. |
Anonymous
| I, for one, am glad they shut it down. Good riddance to you. |
Anonymous
| Managing a listserv entails a certain amount of overhead, and the reasons cited made perfect sense. The listserv can't just be handed over to some unknown party because the current participants specifically opted in to this one and provided their personal contact information, that's not information that should be given over to some unknown party. It wouldn't be ethical or reasonable to just give someone wholesale control without violating privacy concerns. If someone wants to start a new listserv and to let people opt into that one, they are perfectly welcome to do so. |
Anonymous
OP doesn't seem to understand the work and larger issues with a listserv and her emails to DCUM are representative of the kind she was posting on the BASIS listserv. Because OP wouldn't knock it off and keep beating the same drum, the listserv was eliminated. I bet it really drives OP crazy to not be "heard" because that was the major complaint in the first place. |
Anonymous
A huge, living, daily increasing grievance that does one no palpable harm, is the happiest possession that a woman can have. |