School Board Meeting during TS Fay

I attended the school board meeting this evening during TS Fay ( I guess they did not get the message from themselves that all school activities were cancelled in Clay County), and as expected, attendence was even lower than usual.  You sure can get a lot accomplished quickly when you do not have those pesky citizens interrupting your meetings with their 3 minute time limit injections of common sense.  Surprisingly, the most discussed items were the future plans for redistricting high schools and changing over sixth grades from elementary schools to middle schools.  Of course, not too many controversial items will ever be discussed BEFORE an election, unless you can conveniently schedule them during a storm when no one will be there to witness the insanity.

A quick summary of items:

1.  A strange new rewrite of bus exceptions that I will have to study more, but right now it looks like we may be making K-6 graders walk across railroad tracks and six lane highways.

2. I believe they passed the pets in shelters 3-2, but I was still studying the bus exceptions when they voted.

3.  A 3 second discussion to give county administrators a 3% raise passed.  Funny, it took teachers 3 months to negotiate a 3% raise, and of course, the county paid their bargaining team a $1500 stipend to bargain AGAINST the teachers, mostly while they were on the clock.  Their team included the deputy and an assistant superintendent who are already paid in the 6 figure range.  But hey, we love our teachers,

4. Zero mention of the GCS schools without power and we being the only local county that went to school yesterday.  Zero mention of the new phone systems losing power and being unable to communicate between the schools and the district.  Good thing there was not an emergency like a fire or a tornado or a gunman or a tropical storm.

As I looked at the dias, I noticed a few things that do not add up,  Between the Sueprintendent and the School board members, I counted over 100 years of experience between the six, yet the same old mistakes continue to be made.;  They have done a great job at doing one thing, and that is to sell us on how good our schools are so we will continue to re-elect them.  By setting the target as low as possible at the FCAT test, they can continue to walk right up to the target and blast a hole in the bullseye and brag about all the A's we get in FCAT.  It does not matter that we only have a 75% grad rate in our "good schools."  It does not matter that we now have more portable classrooms than permanent classrooms.  It does not matter that the Fleming Island Junior high school promised 7 years ago is now not even on the 5 year plan.  It does not matter that even if kids graduate they cannot get a job or get into college becasue all they have been trained to do is write a 5 paragraph FCAT essay.  It does not matter that children sat in dark un-air conditioned rooms for hours yesterday with no communication to the school district because of poor planning and incompetency (And not one mention of it tonight, contingency or otherwise, especially if we play the what if game like what if there had been a tornado?).

If school board members make about 35K for about 25 meetings a year that may last about 1.5 hours a meeting, that is about $933 an hour, not including photo ops at new schools with shovels and hard hats, although they might get a stipend for that, I am not sure.  They also get a couple hundred a month travel expenses.  Maybe I should have run for school board.

Please tell your friends to consider their choices for Superintendent and school board.  My kids were quick to point out the other night when we were watching a movie called Men in Black II when Will Smith referred to Tommy Lee Jones as "Old and Busted" while referring to himself as the "New Hotness" that it reminded them of my race against an opponent with 35 years in the same building in the same county.  I do not consider myself either new or hot, but I have new common sense ideas and plans and programs that will make Clay County the hottest school district in the southeast US.

And if I am elected, we will actually make the children's safety our number one priority and when I am done with the first term, we actually will have better schools, or I will not run again.

Thanks and don't forget to vote.

V/R, Pat