Herban Sprawl

06/15/09
We’ve got Trouble right here in the Star City, with a capital T and that rhymes with P and stands for Principal!

With all due apologies to Meredith Wilson, but it was hard to pass that one up because it’s true! It seems someone at William Fleming High School decided to call the bluff of the biggest playground bully of them all, Principal Susan Willis, and reported a testing irregularity to the Department of Education. An investigation ensued, and sure enough, there was plenty of evidence to support the allegation.

For as long as this person has been in charge of Fleming, teachers have been going underground at the speed of light. The turnover has been tremendous, and the only thing they will say through gritted teeth was that they got sick of being threatened and bullied. Those who were too close to that golden range of the magic retirement numbers have been trying valiantly to stay the course, so they’ve had the most to lose. Needless to say, they have had some good administrators, so they knew a snow job when they saw one.

The ones to feel sorry for are the ones in the mid-range of their careers. They’ve been in the city just long enough to be too expensive for another school division to hire them, and they are far enough out the the magic numbers range to put them in the danger zone. I don’t have any statistics on which experience tiers have the largest attrition numbers, but I have my suspicions.

With the new superintendent, teachers hoped she might approach the large scale drain of talent by putting the onus on principals, which is where it belongs, but it seemed that a couple of the biggest bullies got left alone, and morale at those schools remained in the cellar. But this latest event, which involved the investigation of testing irregularities on the High Holy SOL tests, brought out Dr. Vella Wright.

When I was a school testing coordinator, I was trying to deal with a faculty that openly thumbed their noses at the standardized testing required by the city. Then assistant super of instruction, Rita Bishop, called me into her office and grumped about “that little alternative school” and pretty much gave me my marching orders to straighten them out vis a vis the tests. The SOLs were on the horizon, and life as they knew it, was about to change forever.

The testing guru was Vella Wright, and a more reasonable, ethical and fair administrator has never walked the earth, in my opinion. She laid it out for us. The security measures, in the days before it all went online, were complex. We had to count every blasted piece of paper, pencil and booklet. It called for some pretty elaborate organizational skills, and the kicker was the list of things that qualified as testing irregularities.

I had one teacher who refused to pay attention in the required testing in-service I had to give, a principal with no spine, and teachers who were argumentative and nasty to me. All the testing irregularities were in the first one’s room, and believe me, she flaunted her power. I dutifully reported what I had to report because Vella said I had to. We were lucky. The state never wandered into our building.

When a principal, who has worked in another school division doing the same job as Vella used to do, knows the regulations, that person can find all sorts of loopholes. To be truthful and fair, the Star City isn’t the only school division in this region to have employed the tactics she did. Salem is chock full of little tap dances, but their teachers keep their mouths shut. Their teachers, by and large, do not work for bullies, so they have no desire to call attention to their pecadillos. William Fleming teachers, on the other hand, have had it, and for one brave soul to have figured out what was really going on, and to have spoken up, took immense courage, or good risk assessment skills - or both! It may have taken a while to gather enough solid evidence, but clearly, someone outsmarted her and that’s when it hit the fan.

Vella Wright doesn’t want any of that kind of nonsense on her watch. She now has the power to deal with principals who don’t follow the rules, and the superintendent isn’t the kind to put up with that sort of thing, either. The school board meets today, and if Susan Willis isn’t fired, there’s going to be a huge firestorm of outrage on the part of the community. She has to go. They cannot afford to keep her in any capacity.

At issue are the other people involved in the scandal. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt. It could well have been one of those people who was the whistleblower. It is quite conceivable that the playground bully had threatened them sufficiently to force them to do her bidding. Most teachers are not the kind who will buck authority, and you can bet that if there was any disagreement with her, they would have been laterally transferred to the school division of Outer Slobovia. The job market for people with experience isn’t so great, and unless they were actively pursuing administrative jobs elsewhere and had a contract lined up, the odds favor them going along with her decree. It doesn’t justify the dishonesty, but it goes a long way in explaining it. Fear for one’s job will do that do a person.

What it all boils down to is that there is still a culture of bullying on the part of administrators, and the central office staff needs to clamp down on that. They are operating with a pared down staff that is still smarting over pay increases for some central office people. Cleaning house with the building administrators should be their next priority, and the teachers need to see that the superintendent is serious about retaining their services - so much so that she is willing to unload even principals whose schools are getting results on the SOLs. The exit rate at each school needs to be carefully examined. The Star City cannot afford any more Susan Willises.