After last week, it's hard not to wonder on whose side the leaders of our public schools sit.
Despite years of failures to turn around the five lowest-performing schools in our district, members of the Hamilton County Board of Education seem bent on perpetrating yet another failure - failure to understand their mission and responsibility.
Instead, many on the board seem poised to play obstructionist to a more-than-fair proposal from Tennessee Education Commissioner Candice McQueen to form a collaborative state and county alliance to improve the schools.
That collaborative partnership would mean forming a new board to oversee a five-school district, with 60 percent of the board members selected by the state and 40 percent selected by Hamilton County Schools. The board would have between seven and 10 members.
The alternative is that the state simply takes over our five lowest-performing schools.
"There is not an option for no decision," McQueen told our school board during a Thursday night board meeting after years of warning. If the board doesn't agree, her office will move forward to place at least some of the schools in the state-run Achievement School District.
Doesn't this seem like a no-brainer?
But it should have seemed like a no-brainer to spend $10 million in federal funds over five years on programs to help those schools, too. But not for our school leaders. Instead, they sat on most of that money rather than spend it. Then they seemed shocked that the schools showed no change in academic growth.
Meanwhile, our school board on Monday night conducted the last three interviews to whittle down from eight to five the number of superintendent candidates. It's been 14 months since the district's previous superintendent stepped down under a cloud, and the process to find his replacement has been anything but transparent.
Hamilton County's five most recently elected or named school board members - as well as the four elected in 2014 - all told the Chattanooga Times Free Press and local voters they wanted to see more accountability and transparency in school administration and on the board itself. But the board, encouraged by chairman, Steve Highlander, narrowed the list of superintendent finalists from 14 to 10 through private emails.
All of these board members are the same people who were outraged (some so much so that they decided to seek a school board seat) when the former superintendent and the current interim superintendent kept quiet the dire academic growth rates of Hamilton County students. They are the same folks who were horrified to learn about the Ooltewah basketball team hazing rape from the newspaper rather than from school officials. And they are the same folks who were shocked by a damming state report that found school administrators seriously dragged their feet in spending for the county's lowest performing schools.
Nothing about our schools - and especially nothing about the schools' leadership - should be secret from the parents and grandparents of the children educated there, especially at a time when Hamilton County schools are struggling so hard for parental and taxpayer trust. But not only have these board members chosen now to be secretive, they now seem to be sanctioning the school system's effort to keep it secret - or at least inaccessible to the public.
Over recent months, the Times Free Press has requested two sets of public records, one from the Hamilton County Department of Education administrators to tally complaints about bus drivers after learning that Woodmore Elementary School fatal bus crash might have been avoided had school officials paid attention to previous parent and student complaints about the bus driver involved. The second request was made to the Board of Education for the board's emails about the superintendent search over a 10-day period.
System communications director Amy Katcher told the paper that school administrators would compile bus driver complaint records for the paper at a cost of $1,903. One might assume that any responsible school system would already be keeping parent and student complaints about bus drivers in some sort of catalogued form, but not here. Had it been, the school system would be prohibited by law to charge the paper or a parent for the compiling labor.
When we amended the request to limit the search from five years to one year, remarkably the cost shot up to $2,525. Katcher said it would take 45 hours of work to gather the records (1,688 pages of complaints) plus the cost of copy paper. We would be paying for the employee's $45 an hour work rate. This is accessible?
On the board emails request, the paper paid $176 for three emails printed in 12 pages (multiple pages were duplicates of the same correspondence). The district claimed it took an employee who makes $34 a hour six hours to pull three email threads.
Really? Is there any way the state can take over all of our schools?
Our school administrators and our school board members seem to have forgotten for whom it is that they do this important work.
They do it for the children who learn safely in our schools - or at least who are supposed to be learning and who are supposed to be safe in our schools.