Marblehead school board will send complaints to administrators

MARBLEHEAD – School Committee members won?t be acting on complaints as individuals, according to a revised policy they adopted last week.Instead they will “recognize and support” the administrative chain of command and refer complaints to the administration.They will share their perspectives on committee business “be open to new information.”The changes were the work of committee members Kathleen Leonardson and Jonathan Lederman and resolve Lederman?s difficulties with the former code, which banned committee members from acting on complaints as individuals.The wording that concerned Lederman in 2009 and 2010 told members not to “make statements or promises of how he/she will vote on matters that will come before the committee.”Lederman voted against the code in the past two years because he said this section restricts “what we can say as individuals.”New member Thomas Connolly, who called that paragraph “a gag order” a month ago and proposed adding the phrase “provided that the superintendent is pro-actively addressing these challenges” to the ban on individual actions, has been asked to “wordsmith” the revisions without altering their meaning.Lederman made the motion to accept the revisions and it passed unanimously. As a policy, the changes must be approved two more times.