>What bothers me here is not just that a single school board member
>objected to Burrough's formal, written response about eliminating
>the Spanish-language-student program (although I note that Chris
>Stewart also thought it his prerogative to simply remove from the
>school and take with him one of the posters about that response that
>were on hallway easels).
It's that he was able to swing his weight around at MPS headquarters
and get Bernadeia to immediately suspend Burrough's principal. I
guess she can do that, just decide to remove a principal without
public hearings or even hearing the other side of what happened on
this unannounced visit. But that speaks of atrocious management,
beyond just the corrupt element of one school board member throwing
his weight around because he doesn't believe that Hispanics are
really people of color, or a minority in our city, or poor, or
whatever his problem is on this issue.
Reading through the Star Tribune on-line comments on this article, I
note that no one seems to have pointed a finger directly at the
person who manages the schools day to day. Did Bill Green get
involved in this? He's the Superintendent, right? Was there a polling
of the rest of the School Board before the suspension of the
principal? Why is the principal suspended, when the nasty adjectives
apparently were thrown around by Chris Stewart, not the principal?
I really worry about the latest shuffling around of the district's
schools and programs; as a non-parent but contributing heavy property
tax dollars for the schools, all I see is games being played with
failing programs, year after year after year. No improvement. Now the
sudden ousting of the principal of a school that is not only
successful academically, but trying to influence the process of
deciding what to do with Mpls schools in a way that does not destroy
that success.
So it's in Southwest Minneapolis. So what? I have my problems with
the city's bias toward Southwest and Downtown to the exclusion of
just about every other part of our town, but, hey! if Southwest
didn't have good schools, where would MPS be, as a district?
I certainly hope the Star Tribune uses some of its newly
re-discovered investigative reporting powers (the long story on the
cops and the gangsta has some riveting narrative moments, I find), to
look further into what kind of dysfunction there really is at Mpls
Public Schools. In its administration. At the building on Broadway
St. We can vote out a Chris Stewart if necessary, but the
administration seems entrenched and stuck in a non-functioning mode.
Connie
Como, in Southeast Minneapolis