“Lakewood is almost hopeless, a community that is clueless about exactly what has created its problems, a district long divided over decades. Some observers have called it ‘Bosnia,’ and not without good reason. Don’t be surprised if the new superintendent doesn’t last very long.”
On target — again. Forgive me for patting myself on the back like Rush Limbaugh.
According to an impeccable source, Lakewood Superintendent James Richardson was asked to leave the building Friday and not come back. I heard it was three school board members and the athletic director who escorted the man from Otisville, Ohio, out and sent him packing his bags after a stint that lasted less than nine months.
Rumor has it Richardson was using the infamous “N’ word around other professionals. Also not endearing him was his bungling of the issue to privatize the bus drivers and custodians. The man walked in the door with just a 4-3 vote to have him hired, which should have been his clue to stay away. A 4-3 split likely is as good as it gets, so the loss of just one of the four spelled certain doom.
Among the six school districts in Barry County and environs, there have been three messy divorces between school boards and their top hired administrator in the last six months. Besides Richardson and Lakewood, we’ve had to watch that awful train wreck in Caledonia with Wes VanDenburg and we’ve seen Ron Archer being forced out at Delton.
There is so much unhappiness in public schools these days, much of it because so many are struggling to make ends meet financially and massive cutbacks have been the rule, not the exception. Most seem to want to point to the man in charge, the superintendent, as the scapegoat for the problems, but we ought to look at ourselves.
We parents and citizens have gleefully enjoyed all those tax cuts that put money back in our pockets over the last 20 years while public education has been slowly starved to death. With tax cuts there is less and less money for state government to adequately fund education, so local districts have to cut expenditures for athletics, classroom instruction, educational trips, the arts and a host of other things. Remember when pay to play was just a temporary money saver? It’s been brought into the realm of the commonplace. Now we holler when our local custodians and bus drivers lose their jobs and are replaced by private companies. And we holler when a local elementary school is threatened with closing. Yet we keep electing the bozos who cut taxes, promote privatizing and come up with destructive and stupid laws like “No Child Left Behind,” which does nothing to help public schools but instead sets them up to fail.
What do we expect the schools to do with declining revenue? We haven’t been paying attention. If we want quality education, we have to pay for it.
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2 comments:
Pat your clairvoyant self on the back Pol!
Now, can you look into your crystal ball and tell me this weeks lotto numbers?
When our taxes were cut, the lottery income was supposed to be going to the schools. This was more revenue than taxes! What happened to that and why isn't it ever discussed?
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