The Panther Valley School Board can be a real scream

Paul Carpenter

August 29, 2008

The German term ''angst,'' when not capitalized, is likely to come up in any discussion of existentialism. It means anxiety or emotional strife.

If capitalized, ''Angst'' is a family name that means Â well, at times, it seems to mean the same thing.

In the latest installment of the Panther Valley School Board soap opera, board member R. Mickey Angst was excluded from secret meetings because, according to others on the board, he spilled the beans about what happened at previous secret meetings.

That, it seems, caused no small measure of anxiety and emotional strife.

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Panther Valley is in the part of the hard coal region nearest the Lehigh Valley, straddling the Carbon-Schuylkill line. Most of the school district is in Carbon County, but reflects the Byzantine political climate of Schuylkill County.

So Angst fits right in.

I love that area and I've worked at both of the daily newspapers that do their best to cover it -- The Pottsville Republican and The Morning Call. When I started at the latter, I was in the Lehighton bureau, whose turf included that stretch of perpetual perplexity from Coaldale to Nesquehoning.

I don't recall when I first heard of Angst, but it had something to do with the fact that he called himself a ''journalist'' at the time he was using his radio station news operations to advance his personal political aspirations and agenda. Prior to his own election, newsman Angst got into screaming matches with board members over certain issues.

Now that he is on the school board, Angst has not shrunk from controversy, nor from his dual role as a public official and a newsman who covers himself. He raised a fuss in March when he used his ''Air Your Opinion'' talk show to bash student athletes, who are also subject to his whims as a school board member.

Some board members responded with a plan to ban two radio stations from district sporting events.

Angst is less tolerant of conflicts of interest by others, and a month later, he used his show to bash the district's special education program, prompting a new board rule to restrict comments to an ''official'' spokesman -- in a vain bid to get Angst to shut up.

In the case of the special education program, there was cause for concern. That program was run by a man who owns the outfit that the district paid to provide special education services. Another man jumped from his job as superintendent to a job at that outfit, as did at least one principal, and some board members were accused of having ties to it.

In the midst of that fuss, Angst accused the board of violating the state's Open Meetings Law by holding secret meetings on issues not covered by the law's executive session privileges.

Still later, Angst publicly apologized for saying unkind things about the special education program's intrigues. Nevertheless, a week after that, the board voted to yank Angst from all committees and ban him from the secret meetings.

Among other things, he was accused of ''leaking'' secrets to the public. The operations of government schools, you see, are none of the public's business.

And so it went, until last week, when the board divulged that its solicitor had ruled in favor of throwing Angst out of executive sessions. (The ruling was in June, but was kept secret until late August.) A story in Thursday's paper said the board voted 6-1 (with Angst, of course, dissenting) to implement the executive session ban on Angst.

''It has nothing to do with freedom of speech,'' board President Ron Slivka was quoted as saying.

It has to do with such things as hiring a new teacher, who, fresh out of college, had 501 school districts from which to choose in Pennsylvania but picked Panther Valley, where, by a wild coincidence, his daddy is on the school board. Angst argued, publicly, that more than a dozen other applicants with better credentials were rejected.

The concept of angst (small A) is often associated with ''The Scream,'' a painting by Edvard Munch showing an anguished light-bulb face framed by two hands.

The next time you see a version of that painting, think of Panther Valley.

paul.carpenter@mcall.com 610-820-6176

Paul Carpenter's commentary appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays.