A lot has happened in our country this week and I am not gonna write about it. It isn’t that I don’t care, more like I don’t have any words. At least not any words that haven’t already been said about a quizillion times.

I am gonna rant about our own local superwoman instead. Who is this superwoman? She is the wondrous school superintendent that our wondrous school board hired less than two years ago and is “retiring” in June (spell “retiring” however you want). We hired the Superwoman at an unprecedentedly high salary, as I wrote about here, and she signed a contract to stay for five years. Yes, I was skeptical. That blahg entry wasn’t very polite and a few of my five readers actually commented. I took their points seriously and posted a follow-up entry a few days later.

Alas. My intuition was right and the Superwoman was not a good fit for school superintendent on The Planet Ann Arbor. I can’t entirely blame her. The school board decided upon a salary of $245,000 before they even began the search. It wasn’t the Superwoman’s fault that “we” paid her that much but, in an era when people are trying to gut public education and teachers and other “little” employees are having to accept more and more concessions, this salary dogged her throughout her tenure here and she really did not live up to it.

I don’t know what talents this superwoman possessed. She claimed to have expertise at dealing with the “achievement gap” but I doubt that anything has changed with that. The achievement gap will NOT narrow until our society gets serious about dealing with the socio-economic issues behind it. I remember some of the sound bites — like when the board tried to cut busing to the bones and a parent asked for some basic busing data. “You’ll have to FOIA that!”, shrilled the Superwoman. What? And I will also guess that her salary was enough to pay for weekly flights back to the East Coast to be with her family after working a four-day week here. Say what? Let them eat cake?

As much as I disliked the Superwoman, I am equally disenchanted with the board of education. Why did they hire this person? And why are they hiring the same “executive search firm” AGAIN for the NEXT Superperson search? The short answer is that because since the Superwoman didn’t work out, the search firm will do a new search for free (or almost free, my b-l-o-n-d-e brain exploded at that point and didn’t quite understand all the damn details).

I could go on and on about what I think we should look for in a new Superperson. But I won’t. Although I usually write my blahg from a small, ugly chitchen in a raggedy old house on The Planet Ann Arbor, I know that I don’t have a lot of local followers. But I want to say to everyone everywhere, GET INFORMED and VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE!!!!

I know it’s hard to spend time getting to know all of the candidates for every election that comes along. And it’s hard to tell what any candidate will actually do once elected. But listen to me. I personally know a couple of people on our local school board. I love them but they are not doing a good job. I will always regard them as friends but they will absolutely *not* get my vote again. So, research your local candidates and VOTE!!!

And god help us here on The Planet Ann Arbor. Who will the school board and its executive search firm find next…

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 18th, 2013 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.