Painful Everything
Ugh. It looks like there’s some action in the mayor’s race today. Painful, disappointing, disheartening action that has been unfolding while I’ve toiled today at wherever it is I work.
Friday Kurt called into a live show on channel 17 and said it would be “morally wrong” to walk away from Burlington’s debt to Citibank, whether or not they are successful in their lawsuit to get the 33 million bucks they loaned the city back.
Today Miro pounced on the statement saying it put the city in legal Jeopardy. Then Kurt accused Miro of going negative.
Kurt is still pushing the sale of BED, which is a bad idea. Philip seems happy with Miro’s apparent willingness to scrap.
You know Miro has reached out to me in weird ways. He left me a nice voicemail on the day of the re-vote. He sent me a nice card (terrible, terrible handwriting) and he’s left a couple of comments on this blog. But so far he has ignored my request to do an on the record interview. To this point that’s just as well, since I still haven’t fully recovered from my nearly 2 hour long interview with Tim Ashe. That transcription was 31 pages long. It almost killed me. I saw Tim yesterday at the school board’s legislative party held at Jill Evans’s house. We had almost the whole school board there and only four legislators- Tim Ashe, Chris Pearson, Jason Lorber and Suzi Wizowati. It was very nice to meet you Suzi.
Tomorrow the school board will vote to send a double-digit tax increase to voters. I don’t know if I can support that. I have this very strong suspicion the school department is wasting money. For example, nobody seems to know what the “Magnet School Coordinator” does for 100K. Also we want to buy laptops for every kid whether they already have one or not. I think that’s probably a waste. We could lease laptops to the 25% of kids who really need them at a low rate for a fraction of the cost. And compliance with act 60 is great and everything, but maybe we could spread the pain of taking on take on the cost of non-teacher retirement over two years instead of one. That actually was the plan right up until the last minute. Oh and did you know the school department’s diversity director got a ten thousand dollar raise last year? And it’s really hard to get a handle on exactly what he does, too. [cut to the Bobs from Office Space: "What would you say it is that you do here?"]; If diversity and equity were truly embedded in the culture of the Burlington School District, we wouldn’t need a separate diversity office (125K), now would we? Those policies and attitudes would be manifested through our regular old HR department.
Wednesday the Ward 7 Democrats will caucus (7PM at Burlington College/Catholic Diocese) and will be looking to run a school board candidate. Yikes! I hope they just support me, but do I have to call myself a Democrat? I thought school board races are supposed to be non-partisan! I’m gonna have to show up there with my petition and hope for the best.
6 comments
You seem to be on to something with regards to the District wasting money like it grows on trees. Central Office is so disgustingly top heavy – keep digging, I’m certain you’ll find more! Things are so bad financially and the D&E coordinator got a 10k raise? How does that jibe, Haik, with your previous comments regarding the average worker in Burlington and District salaries? I guess things weren’t so bad last year after all? The money is always spent on useless people and paras and teachers and custodians and food service have to fight for COLA…keep digging…keep asking questions…keep doing the math…I think you’re on to something…keep at it…let us know…
I guess it’s like common negotiating…you ask for a high price, that gets rejected and you end up in the middle where you thought you’d be all along. Otherwise, it’s not clear why the school board would go out with this type of budget at this time. It will be soundly rejected. The voters are fit to be tied! There’s a very negative mood about city gov’t. The school board will be lucky to get a 2-3% increase.
Haik, you are doing a fantastic job on the School Board and Kudos to you and Ed for standing strong the other night. Ward 7 is lucky to have you and you have my full support in your bid for re-election!
Thanks Paul! That’s huge.
Haik. I will be supporting you on the first Tuesday in March.
Your common sense, and willingness to hold all accountable is refreshing.
wow, well Haik you are correct. the school board is wasting money. and a lot of it. so where to begin. i mean, think about the 10 % raise of terry bailey? really did he deserve that on top of his 100K salary when 6 years ago his position was not even there?
ok, or let us look at how poorly the board is doing and what kind of poor job you all are doing to this wonderful town. First off, Jeanne, how many principals has she gone through? i counted 9. and 4 of them are one year and done! not a great record for the board appointed super. but let us look at what else the board has approved of, well, i mean look at the most recent debacle of the IAA principal. yikes! talk about really bad board decision, Mr. Christopher was not the choice of the parents, he was not the choice of the teachers BUT the board liked him because he was BLACK. right? he was fired from his last two jobs…and now for $96K a year he is doing the job of a PARA! That is one heck of a way to teach the children about diversity ( don’t get me started about the diversity coordinator) because we hired the black guy, and now he isn’t doing his job, but we are still paying him so we can avoid a lawsuit, and get this now Mr. Bobby is doing all the hard work? right? and MR. C is monitoring the cafeteria, and saying hello! great job on that one board! yeah, how come no one is telling the tax payers about that? hmm. molly walsh doesn’t cover the board. instead she likes to pick on the smallest person out there. the janitor! heavens we would actually pay those guys for working like 12 hours a day? i’ve been into those schools and they get super dirty and those janitors are there every single day and we know what they do and what happens if they don’t show up. right?
and what happens when we pick on the teachers. the teachers show up every day and i am willing to bet we can account for every single minute of their days and we know what they do all day every day. and if they didn’t do their jobs then someone knows about it. what would happen if a teacher did nothing in their classroom for most of the day? it would get noticed…and they can’t do that. most of them are probably in before contract hours and out after contract hours. but yet, molly walsh picks on them like they are not doing their jobs.
but back to the board and what kind of job they do. look at any company and if the company is not doing well people look at the board. so let us think about more waste at the top, thankful for public records we can tell how much people are getting paid….hmmm. how about the district’s curriculum coordinator (how many coordinators did the board hire for more than 80K a year??) she makes a lot of money and what does she do all day? last i checked the middle schools are not even using the same textbooks…so that these kids enter into the high school on different pages…how hard is it to coordinate the same text books for the TWO different middle schools? not that hard. But you guys on the board have nothing to judge her on.
the board has failed on so many levels that no one is looking at the top. instead you guys are fighting for peanuts and spending mad loot, or wasting loot on coordinators and people doing lousy jobs at the top. and yet molly walsh has nothing to say about that….
but then again, who is listening and what can this do? probably nothing…and so you all on the board will pat yourselves on the back and go back to the schools and tell them to cut their budgets so mr bailey can get a raise for his wonderful service. and you all on the board can keep talking….
and after digging a bit more about Ward 7 i shudder and won’t even talk about Ed Scott’s tenure at BHS….[redacted] … Yikes!
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