During the meeting's open-forum period, Scott Spellman addressed the board with a detailed public comment alleging the board bypassed the district's established policy and acted behind closed doors when it directed removal of 'safe zone' classroom signs.

Spellman said the board's policy IFA delegates authority for classroom displays and their removal to school principals and that the board's decision to direct the superintendent to remove signs during an executive-session evaluation was inconsistent with the policy's stated process. He told trustees the issue should have been handled by principals and raised questions about why the board waited nearly a year to raise it publicly.

"This board chose to make the decision in a closed meeting, tying it to the superintendent's job performance," Spellman said in his remarks, and added the move undermined trust between the community and the board. He also criticized what he characterized as selective enforcement, contrasting removal of the signs with board members displaying partisan imagery during meetings.

Spellman said the signs were intended as quiet signals to vulnerable students that a trusted adult was available in the building; he argued there was no evidence the signs disrupted the learning environment and that removing them had a chilling effect.

Why it matters: The remarks raise process and transparency concerns about how the board enforces display policies and whether actions tied to personnel evaluations were handled in compliance with policy and open-meeting rules. Spellman requested the board defend its decisions in public and urged consistent application of neutrality rules to all viewpoints.

Board response and context: At the meeting the superintendent had earlier (in Friday notes and in later written comments) described the policy interpretation as an area with differing viewpoints. The board did not offer extended public debate on Spellman's comments during open forum; no formal board action on the display policy was recorded at the meeting beyond later adoption of KASB policy updates that included clarifying language elsewhere in the policy packet (the packet adopted by the board contained clarifying language about summer camps and site-council appointment procedures, not the specific display dispute).