One reader’s take on the March School Board meeting

Dear Editor:

Anyone paying attention to Clay County schools? Superintendent [Addison] Davis has hired on a posse of Duval buddies with two extra jobs (created expressly) for same, including one for Janice Kerekes’ son. Kerekes is a board member and political ally of the superintendent. Incredibly, disputes have been small despite regular complaints about a ballooning staff during the last administration.

Additionally, the union bosses appear to have unlimited time to address the board (I counted almost seven minutes each for the March meeting), whereas normal citizens have three minutes (ten minute presentations are also available, but have been moved to the end of the meeting as part of a plan to phase them out because the superintendent doesn't like them [this announced just after he expressed how much he likes input from the public during a special meeting]).

The collusion doesn't end there. Kerekes and Carol Studdard, practically panting each meeting over Davis, have vowed to fully commit to his proposals to “give him the tools he needs” for his “vision.” Frankly, it’d be hilarious if it weren’t riding on the backs of the families of the county. This was supplemented by a twenty-minute PowerPoint presentation based on a statistical analysis of the schools supplied by teacher input.

From it we got a lot of high-dollar phraseology (quartile, climate and culture [till death do them part], triangulation, etc.), perhaps unrivaled since Dr. [Susan] Sailor’s famous research paper. This was done to make the audience believe something significant was being said, when in actuality it could easily be paraphrased: We’re gonna look at the high-achieving schools and have the bad ones do what they do. But I guess when you're selling lines like that to the suckers, the wallets don't come out. Now announcing a proposal for new administrator: Superintendent of the Common Man’s Thesaurus, salary: $97,178.34, benefits including preemptive rhetorical

belligerence, a corner office and a microphone with a red button that lights up.

Issues of the new bus GPS plaguing the wards of CESPA came up as well in the March meeting, but primarily regarding the student checkin/check-out system and its detriment to the efficiencies of time and safety. Count me for the detractors wholesale, because tracking students down to a geographical specificity should be vehemently shunned by the community. Betsy Condon’s comment, now being appraised at one cent (half the market value) about giving students an RFID device to log their travels should not taken lightly. Or forgotten.

So far, I have seen no leadership from anyone concerning actual curricular matters and it doesn’t look likely that I ever will. The board seems preoccupied with managing their own cronyism and political futures and the unions will continue to legitimize their own existence by keeping their staff as disgruntled as possible, using them as political weapons.

Jaymes Neal Strickland

Keystone Heights