Update 2: So I have seen a message from President Liza Rankin on why she, Director Evan Briggs, and Director Michelle Sarju backed out of this meeting. In a nutshell: - She says there was no organization to the meeting which is just not true. They had a moderator lined up and naturally the board members could have set parameters for what to discuss, length of meeting, etc. All that was fleshed out. - She also claimed that if the meeting was PTA sponsored, they needed to have liability insurance to use the school space. Hello? PTAs use school space all the time and know they have to have this insurance. - She seems to be worried about the Open Public Meetings law. Look, if she has a meeting in a school building on a non-personnel topic, it should be an open meeting. It appears that Rankin is trying, over and over, to narrow the window of access that parents have to Board members. She even says in her message - "...with decisions made in public." Hmmm - She also says that th
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The "bad taste" of the last superintendent still lingers and many will not trust whoever is in the position of superintendent, but at least this "interim" superintendent is trying her best to overcome that legacy...
Give her a chance to prove her mettle and who knows, maybe she will be the superintendent everyone has been hoping for... She will please some of the people some of the time, but she won't please all of the people all of the time...
Just some food for thought...
However, she's the new sheriff in town and between her and Mr. Boesche (the interim CFO), they need to clean up Dodge. That cannot be done with a smile. There are serious issues at headquarters. For example, it was just revealed that staff did not implement a raise in athletic fees that the Board passed last year. Staff not only did not implement it, they didn't tell the Board about it until recently.
This kind of hiding of information from the duly-elected School Board has got to stop. That anyone thinks it's a good idea or that they can get away with it is someone who needs to be exited from headquarters.
That this district needs constant overhauls and professional development and retraining indicates a deeply systemic problem. All the great academic initiatives in the world will not do any good for our students if the headquarters is poorly run.
I would agree that this is very much a puff piece and should have been on the editorial page. That there is only one counter-voice points to a lack of balance in the piece. That there was no questioning of her work in Portland with "Hurricane" Vicki Phillips when it's there to see if you Google it, is troubling.
I do have hopes for Dr. Enfield as she continues her work with our district but in Seattle Schools, it's always good to have a healthy dose of skepticism. That's not being negative; that's being realistic.
I am hopeful for Ms. Enfield. However, her brains and personal skills must be accompanied with backbone to make the necessary sea change.
To me, the complimentary tone is less a problem than the fact that it casts her predecessor in a decidedly unflattering light, from a paper that did NOTHING but lionize MGJ, despite boatloads of data suggesting what a bad leader she was. And now, not a word to explain how and why they were so offbase.
I think that the Board has the heavy lifting to do here. If they want less administration -- they are going to have to lean really hard. They may even have to draw a line in the sand, and say something like: don't deliver a budget that does not limit central admin (or office, whichever it is supposed to be) expense that is more than 5% of overall district expenditures (6 percent in good times, but these are not good times). And don't ask for approval of any more strategic objective contracts, until we get the deliverables: a complete list of everything that is or has been on the plan, which things have been dropped (and why), which have been added (and why), what the budget is, and which things have been deferred/delayed in an effort to meet the Board's request that the focus be on money IN THE SCHOOLS.
I don't see the backbone coming from there.