APEEE’s contribution to Quantum Mechanics

Board meetings, Transparency

UPDATE December 3, 2021:

There is a follow-up to this post.

Regular readers of this blog will surely remember the post on the curious case of the missing minutes. The minutes are still missing from the website but I am reporting back on it because there has been a development… Another surreal development, but… a development nonetheless!

But first, for those of you who might not be familiar with the full story this is the timeline: 

November 4th 2020 APEEE Board Meeting 

Two members of the Board were accused of activism outside of the Board because they had created a discussion forum for parents who were worried about the plan to reorganise the school and move some children from Woluwe to Evere. The two members set up the forum when the APEEE declined to take a position on the issue and parents felt abandoned by their representatives. The two board members were under fire for having involved the concerned parents in the debate about the move. During the meeting the Board was not just making accusations, it was acting as the judge and the jury.

March 4th 2021 APEEE Board Meeting

One of the accused members of the Board objected to the content of the minutes from the November 4th meeting and asked that the minutes be taken down from the APEEE site.

March 15th 2021 APEEE Board Meeting

The member of the Board who had previously asked for the minutes to be taken down informed the Board that she had changed her mind  and withdrew the request.

Now, what do the Board meeting minutes of 15 March 2021 (our copy) actually say? 

“November 2020 Board report: Request was made at the meeting of 4 March to remove Board meeting report of 4 November from the public domain, by a Board member named in the report. APEEE President and Vice Presidents support this request. The Board member concerned withdraws the request however.”

Let’s take a further look.

According to those minutes:

  • At the meeting of 4 March 2021, there was a request by a Board Member that the meeting minutes from 4 November 2020 (link to our copy) be removed from public domain. So far so good. After all, during the Annual General Meeting of the APEEE Woluwe of 21 January 2021, the two Board Members, that in my opinion were witch hunted on 4 November 2020, both stated that the accusations against them were unfounded. Naturally, anyone feeling falsely accused and publicly dragged through the mud, would instinctively contest the minutes, and request that they be removed. I’m sure that if it had been me, my knee-jerk reaction would have also been: take that sh*t down!
  • It is further mentioned that the APEEE President and vice presidents (there are two of them) agree with the request.
  • Finally, the text also says that the Board Member in question withdrew the request to have the minutes removed. Probably upon thoughtful reflection, she may have concluded  that the accusations were so ridiculous that it would be better to have them out there in the open rather  than hidden.

This is when things really got my full attention… 🧐

Despite the fact that the Member who had requested that the minutes be removed withdrew her request, some time later the minutes did disappear from the APEEE website. This raises a few questions:

  • If the most interested party changed her mind, why were the minutes removed?
  • And who gave the instruction for them to be removed? The President? One of the vice-presidents?
  • Did the person who ordered the removal have something to hide?
  • If so, what needed to be hidden and why?
The list of minutes in January 2021

You might think that the story ends here. But no, you see, not only did the minutes disappear from the site, but also – apparently – the November 4th 2020 meeting itself never happened because its reference was also deleted from the site. Never mind that in the very same meeting other matters were also debated, the infamous witch-hunt not being the only point under discussion. And the funny thing is that the fact that the meeting disappeared from the website doesn’t stop the Board from referring to it in another official Board meeting minutes (link to our copy)! Like Schrödinger’s cat, that may be considered simultaneously both dead and alive, the meeting simultaneously is and isn’t there! I must say I am rather impressed with how quantum mechanics has found its way into how our APEEE Board operates!

I strongly believe that the minutes should never have been removed. Removing documents from the public domain, just because they are inconvenient should never happen as it is an attempt to rewrite history or hide wrongdoing; a practise that brings back memories of regimes that did so with excruciating detail in a photoshop-free era.

The appropriate  thing to do would be  to offer an official apology to the two members of the Board accused of wrongdoing at the meeting of November 4th  2020. And once issued, such an apology should be linked to the original minutes. But of course, at the risk of repeating myself yet again, this level of transparency is something that doesn’t seem to be on the agenda of the current APEEE Board.