Yes, APEEE Board, where is our Extraordinary General Meeting?

Before anything I must admit something… I almost gave this title to this post: The curious case of the missing EGM… But then I thought I should not challenge yet again Saint Anthony, the patron Saint of missing things. He has already been so kind to find the missing bus monitors last June and I’m sure that after a good and well deserved summer vacation,  he is now a bit rusty on finding stuff!!! 😇

Last year, following the Evere parents’ movement, which at one minute to midnight managed to make sure parents’ voices were heard regarding how the new temporary EEB2 site of Evere would be populated, the APEEE, instead of acknowledging and praising parents for mobilising and engaging in a discussion on the topic, decided to accuse, trial and sentence two of its members. So much for the distribution of powers and a system of checks and balances! The accusations, amongst other ‘sins’, included participating in direct dialog with parents, being active outside the board and disloyalty to the Board. As the reader may easily understand, in a Parents Association these are very serious offenses! How could they dare speak to the parents that elected them? I think the “Schools’ CEO” seriously believes he is running a multinational company, where board members are appointed and not elected…

The two board members’ actions were deemed so serious that our APEEE ‘Crusaders’ (I wonder if there is an Alfie in there…)  eventually decided to impose sanctions on them: their rights to access information deemed confidential by the Board itself, were removed, and access to their official email addresses was blocked. It is worth noting that nowhere in the APEEE’s Statutes is it written that the Administrative Board – please mind the Administrative part of this body’s official name – has the power to curtail the rights of its members. Board members rights are vested upon them by the Association’s General Meeting (the general assembly of  class representatives) and only this body can revoke them.

This most epic ‘witch-hunt’, driven by the fact that the two members had actively participated in the actions and activities of the group of parents lobbying in the Evere file, had its climax at the Extraordinary Board Meeting of 4 November 2020, a meeting that has meanwhile mysteriously disappeared from the APEEE website.

After this meeting’s minutes were published, a considerable number of parents, who were already not happy with the way the APEEE had conducted its business with the Evere file, initiated the procedure to call for an Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM).

At this point I would like to remind the reader that on 6 April 2020 the APEEE had an expectation on how the temporary site of Evere should be populated:

Our expectation was that the burden for filling the Evere site would be shared across schools with an emphasis on prioritising new enrolments to avoid transferring existing pupils.

However, after a long silence of more than six months, and without consulting parents on such an important file with far reaching consequences for so many families and pupils, on 2 October 2020 it discarded itself from taking a position when their initial “expectation” was also an option:

The APEEE does not endorse any of these alternatives as each solution inevitably impacts different groups or school levels in different ways and we have no mandate from parents for taking sides in this respect.

Option 1. New enrolments only

This option seeks to fill the new temporary school only with newly enrolled pupils who do not have a sibling at either Woluwe main school or any of the other Brussels schools. Parents will also be able to volunteer for transferring their children to the new Evere site or waiving their rights to have siblings together on the same site… 

Quite frankly, I think this could easily qualify as a clinical case of lack of coherence and transparency… 😔

But I digress… The goal of calling for an EGM meeting was to discuss the situation around the illegal sanctions applied to the two mentioned board members, and also to discuss the APEEE’s Confidentiality Agreement, which – in the guise of a Data Protection agreement – was actually more like a Non Disclosure Agreement or, in my opinion, just a simple gag order on board members… This confidentiality agreement had been pushed on the Board members earlier in 2020 without an approval by the APEEE’s General Meeting. Actually the agreement was drafted by an external lawyer and there wasn’t even a discussion about it in a Board meeting before it was presented to Board members as fait-accompli by the Chair and the vice presidents.

All this lawyering-up must have surely contributed to the staggering 1.371,74% over expenditure of the legal costs budget line of our association in 2019-2020 financial exercise 😱 (see “honoraires et frais d’avocat / frais de huissier” on page 7 of the PDF file). It seems that in the recent past, the APEEE Board has been acting more like a litigation machine than a parents association… 😬 I mean, why was a lawyer even present at our 2021 Annual General Meeting? Personally, at the time I felt and considered the move to be intimidating. Furthemore, the fact that everyone was muted was, in my opinion, just a way to curtail freedom of expression…

The call for the EGM eventually gathered the support of 81 Full Members (Class Representatives) of our association, a number largely above the required 10% number of such members to call for such a meeting, and a letter was sent to the APEEE asking it to organise the EGM with this agenda.

The first reply from the APEEE was deemed inconclusive by the callers of the General Meeting and, since the APEEE statutes are not explicit on who should organise an EGM – in fact they only state who can convene the meeting (see the 3rd paragraph of article 9), the handful of members that organised the call for the EGM decided to take matters in their own hands and, in roughly three weeks:

• as required by the article 9 of the Statutes, on 30 December 2020, the meeting announcement was posted at the premises of the APEEE, which has its address at the EEB2 School;
• organised the logistics of the online meeting, including the video conferencing system, the registration of participants and the voting;
• created a website for posting all communications related to the meeting; 
• requested the APEEE to, as also prescribed by the Statutes, widely publicize the meeting (a request that was duly ignored); and
• held the meeting on 14 January 2021.

In a last minute letter sent to all Full Members of the Association, on 13 January 2021 – the eve of the EGM, the APEEE Board eventually refused to accept the 14 January meeting as an EGM but recognized its request as valid. However, almost 9 months after the request was sent (on 23 December 2020), the APEEE has yet to organise the meeting.

Around 150 persons attended the meeting of 14 January (including an official representative of the APEEE Board, designated by its President) and three resolutions were voted – two pre-announced in the agenda, and one proposed by a full member during the meeting itself. How open can that be? 😉

In a nutshell what the class representatives voted for is that:

• any future confidentiality agreement has to be based on the principle of transparency, openness and good governance;
• that it has to be accepted by the annual general meeting by the majority of the class representatives as per statutes;
• that imposing sanctions on board members that are not provided for in the Statutes is (surprise, surprise) unlawful.

Now, if a handful of parents – without support from a paid secretariat – managed to organise a meeting in less than one month, I sincerely would like to know what is the APEEE’s excuse for dragging its feet in organising a validly requested EGM for more than nine months?

What I think is abundantly clear however, is that the matters proposed for discussion and vote at the EGM are something the current Board of our association seems to want to avoid discussing in an open forum. This, in turn, leads me to assume that a frank and transparent debate about those matters is definitely not at the top of this Board’s priority list.

But the bottom line is this: there is a legal obligation for the APEEE to comply with the EGM request and anything short of that is a gross and shameful illegality. By not organising it exactly as requested, the APEEE not only violates its own statutes, but also the Belgian law.

So, I ask again:

Where is our  EGM?