Each of these example emails and documents demonstrates that, from start to finish, the MGT Study was rigged by the school board, and the school board's administrators who they directly supervise, to promote the school board’s biased point of view.

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In light of these emails, the school board should immediately answer the following questions:

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1. If the school board really intended for the MGT Study to be "unbiased," why did the school board's administrators meet so frequently with MGT personnel during the 5 months leading up to the public meetings in March 2024? How did these frequent meetings not result in the school board's administrators micromanaging the work performed by MGT, making it impossible for the MGT Study to be unaffected by the biases of the school board's administrators?

2. If the school board really intended for the MGT Study to be "unbiased," why did the school board send their business administrator's own preferred and pre-generated 5 district split scenarios to MGT prior to MGT beginning their work, instead of allowing MGT to develop their own district split scenarios? How is it possible that MGT could come up with their own district split scenarios in an "unbiased" manner when their views were necessarily tainted from the beginning of their work with the school board's preferred split scenarios? Does the school board expect the public to believe that MGT developed their 5 district split scenarios in an independent and unbiased way, but somehow they nevertheless ended up matching exactly the 5 district split scenarios (with only one small tweak to one scenario moving one city) that MGT was sent by the school board's business administrator?

3. If the school board really intended for the MGT Study to be "unbiased," why did the school board's administrators control which community members MGT was allowed to meet with to gather community viewpoints on a potential district split? And how can the school board claim that MGT is an "unbiased" third party when it is clear that MGT didn't hide the fact that they wanted the school board to have complete control over who MGT did and did not interview, and thus were completely open to the bias that the school board would introduce with their selection of interviewees? And why did this list of 128 individuals not include a single one of the 84,703 students currently enrolled in the district? Shouldn't student input be a key part of the study, since the whole reason the district exists is to educate students? And a related question, what about the parents of the 84,703 students in the district? Of the 128 individuals on this list, apparently only 3 individuals (2%) were included on the list because they are parents of students. The other 125 individuals (98%) were apparently included on this list because they are past or present government officials or district employees. When the school board's administrators were controlling whom MGT should interview to gather community viewpoints, why did the school board's administrators completely exclude students and largely exclude parents? How in the world could MGT get an accurate idea of community viewpoints with these two critical groups excluded from their community interviews?

4. If the school board really intended for the MGT Study to be "unbiased," why did the school board's administrators control the questions that could be asked of community members with whom MGT met to gather community viewpoints on a potential district split? Shouldn't MGT have had free rein to ask whatever questions they wanted to best gather the information they needed? 

5. If the school board really intended for the MGT Study to be "unbiased," why did school board members hold two secret meetings with MGT in the morning prior to their public evening meetings with MGT? What exactly was the school board trying to hide from the public in these secret meetings? What changes to the MGT presentation did the board demand of MGT in these secret meetings, beyond the split scenarios that the school board voted to eliminate in these secret meetings? What other votes were taken and what other district business related to a potential district split was conducted in these secret meetings with MGT? What other decisions related to a potential district split were made in these secret meetings with MGT? And if there was nothing nefarious in these secret meetings with MGT, were recordings made of these secret meetings, and were minutes taken in these secret meetings, and would the school board be willing to make any such recordings and minutes available so the public can see what transpired in these secret meetings with MGT?

6. If the school board really intended for the MGT Study to be "unbiased," why did school board members narrow down, in secret meetings with MGT, and thereby control, which district split scenarios MGT presented to the public in their community presentation? Didn't this narrowing down of split scenarios include board members voting, in secret meetings, on which split scenarios to eliminate? What other district split scenarios did MGT come up, and present in the secret meetings with the school board, that the school board voted to prevent MGT from presenting to the public? Would the school board be willing to allow these excluded split scenarios to be made available to the public so the public can decide whether or not these excluded scenarios are superior to the scenarios favored by the school board?

7. If the school board really intended for the MGT Study to be "unbiased," why did the school board's administrators instruct MGT to modify the questions they asked of the community during their community presentation? For MGT to get an accurate idea of public sentiment during the public meetings on March 12-14, shouldn't MGT have had free rein to ask the community questions they thought would be best suited to solicit that public sentiment? How could the school board claim that the district's modifications of MGT's community questions didn't bias those questions toward the biased viewpoint of the school board? And how can the school board claim that MGT is an "unbiased" third party when it is clear that MGT didn't hide the fact that they wanted the school board to modify their community questions, and thus wanted the school board to introduce bias into the community questions?

8. If the school board really intended for the MGT Study to be unbiased, why did the school board's business administrator (Jason Sundberg) instruct MGT to modify their community presentation to include data generated by Mr. Sundberg himself? Wouldn't Mr. Sundberg's data that he generated himself necessarily be biased in favor of the school board's biased point of view? Shouldn't all of the data presented to the public by MGT in the public meetings on March 12-14 have been developed by MGT independently of the school board? How could the public MGT presentation be unbiased when Mr. Sundberg demanded, unsolicited, that MGT modify their presentation to include data that Mr. Sundberg admitted that he came up with on his own (or perhaps with the district budget analyst)? And with regard to the spreadsheet that Mr. Sundberg sent MGT, which includes the scary deficit numbers that caused such a stir during MGT's public presentation, how exactly did those deficit numbers come into existence? Is it safe to assume, since the deficit numbers in Mr. Sandberg's chart appear to match exactly the deficit number presented to the public by MGT, that Mr. Sandberg generated these deficit numbers? And if so, how can it be said that MGT's public presentation was unbiased if one of the most important aspects of that presentation came from a clearly biased source?

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In light of these emails, and until the school board provides satisfactory answers to the above questions, the school board should immediately do the following:

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1. Publicly apologize to the citizens who live in Alpine School District for telling them the lie that the MGT study was ever intended to be "unbiased" and for the lie that MGT would be "recommending some possibilities" of split scenarios because in fact the 5 split scenarios were actually force-fed to MGT by the school board at the beginning of the whole process.

2. Abandon its race toward using the seriously flawed and seriously biased MGT Study as a basis for putting a district split scenario on the ballot for this fall (note - all indications are that the school board intends to vote in April to add a district split scenario to the November ballot - this vote should not take place).

3. Formally request, and then honestly submit to, an outside audit of the way the MGT study was handled within the district (such as perhaps by the State Auditor and the State Board of Education) to understand what mistakes were made so as to avoid similar mistakes in the future.

4. Publicly apologize for the school board's practice of holding secret "serial meetings" (also known as a "rolling quorum") to circumvent Utah's Open Meetings laws, publicly acknowledge the extent to which the school board has employed secret "serial meetings" beyond the known secret meetings with MGT, and publicly commit to abandon this practice going forward.

5. Work to regain the trust that the school board has lost with teachers, staff, students, parents, taxpayers, and other community members with this MGT debacle.

 

*Note - All emails and spreadsheets linked to in this article are unmodified from what I received from the district, with the exception of yellow highlighting that I have added to the emails.