Thursday, August 19, 2010

Inside Four Walls: wanna know why districts go broke?

So last week I told you our superintendent was fired because the district wanted to move in a "different direction", well today we had our back to school district meeting and it was somewhat entertaining.

The first thing was that our board has already replaced Dr. Simms with some guy who has been an interim superintendent 13 times. So for most of us, it seems like they had some guy lined up before they pulled the trigger.

Second of all, the new guy talked about how he was there to work and that he will make some of the tough decisions that haven't been made before...that didn't get a good reaction from anyone in the room by the way.

The funny thing was that I was thinking, "what if no one read the email Dr. Simms sent out or doesn't get the Tribune, they have no clue she was fired." And about that time, 2 people sitting next to me asked where/what happened to Dr. Simms. So that was funny.

Most people didn't like the fact that the board didn't send an email or letter to the staff to explain anything...we were all in the dark.

So back to the title...why districts go broke. Well we found out today (through the grapevine) that Dr. Simms signed an extension of her contract in June of this year...yeah less than 3 months ago. So we also heard she will be getting her salary for 18 months. On yeah on top of that we are now paying an interim guy to "make some hard decisions". So for a district that is already in the red, we are now more in the red because on paper it looks like we have 2 sups.

So, why did we sign her extension? Was everything good and then she pissed someone off? No one knows. I doubt we ever will, but it's moves like this that cause mistrust between the board and the teachers.

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