Following years of hostility from the backward-looking factions of both the school board and the County Commission, the school board’s split vote Thursday to buy out Superintendent Jim Scales’ contract for approximately $300,000 was expected and anti-climatic. It was also shamefully wrong. It smacks of a return to a parochial, racially biased system, just when the community stands at the threshold of the greatest economic opportunity in the city’s history.
Scales is the second of the two superintendents hounded out of office since the 1997 merger of the former city and county school systems by officials who fail to grasp the keys to the future: the necessity of focused initiatives to improve the education of urban minority students, and the necessity of improving funding to propel the school system to excellence.
Where politics reigns
The myopic factions that now seem in charge mainly want good-old-boy politics and puppet-string kowtowing from the superintendent to the parochial views that used to be the norm between the county governing body and the prior county school system.
Indeed, it is the County Commission’s hostage power of the purse which has enabled the Fred Skillern-led faction of the commission to keep squeezing the school budget and exerting political pressure on the board and the superintendents. His unyielding grip frustrated, hobbled and eventually ended the tenures of Dr. Jesse Register in 2006, and of Scales this week.