THIS IS OFF THE RECORD, OKAY? It’s just between you and me. I know I can trust you to keep a secret because if these remarks were to get around my chances of being elected to the school board would be significantly reduced, perhaps even destroyed, then where would we be? So remember, I’m counting on you to keep all this under your hat
RUNNING FOR ANYTHING in Anderson Valley is like running for eighth grade class president. When I was an eighth grader, if a boy were running and he lost the male electorate got beat up on the grounds some males had defected. If a female were running and there was a majority of females in the class, she won because female voters never crossed gender lines.
THEY KNEW ENOUGH to rack up victories where they could because males held most of the trump cards. In Anderson Valley an election is a bit more complicated than gender, but not much. Putting it simply, an election for school trustee is mostly a popularity contest with the added factor of all the people working for the schools uniting behind that person who will make a weak, even incompetent and irresponsible trustee.
OVER THE YEARS, the staff has unblinkingly supported a series of administrators who suffered from extreme psychosis, alcoholism, reading disabilities, extreme verbal dysfunctions, religious fanaticism, Kraft-Ebbing quality sexual peculiarities, criminal malfeasance, and a general inability startling even by the standards of Mendocino County where standards are so low the only person ever to have seen them is Jacques Cousteau.
IN A COUPLE OF WEEKS, three or four of you will attend a candidate’s night at the elementary school. The candidates will be painfully sincere and vow undying devotion to quality education and children. The fact that half our teaching staff should have been fired years ago, that a college-bound freshman will not get the kind or quality of instruction he needs to function in a competitive college and that generally speaking public schools have become little more than a jobs program for the least talented graduates of the state college system, will not be mentioned. The fact that your kid spends much of his time filling in the blanks on xeroxed busy work sheets is a high school facility that is utterly lacking in warmth, color, beauty, and intellectual stimulation, surrounded by adults who are, for the most part, neurotic, unhappy and dumb. That’s the good days. On bad days the place amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.
IS THE HIGH SCHOOL HOPELESS? Probably, unless there are additions to the staff who can somehow make it a more interesting and effective place. After all these years there is finally an administration in place that is genuinely concerned and would like to establish a good school. Whether or not they can do it is up in the air at this point. The trustees in place are capable and conscientious and seem to know where the problems are, which in itself is a new development in local schools.
MY PLATFORM consists of two planks: The first being no more secrets. The community will know exactly what is going on. There won’t be any kind of dishonesty, secrecy and crumb bum maneuvering characteristic of the Crawford regime. My second plank is a promise to revive the school-within-school plan adopted in principle by the trustees three years ago and then crushed by Crawford and the high school staff. This plan would bring in competent instructors in academic areas now ignored.
LOOK AT THE HIGH SCHOOL from a parents point of view. This year, as usual, there is a new math teacher and a new foreign language teacher. Say you kid wants to qualify himself for the U.C. system. Does he or his parents know he will get competent instruction in math or a foreign language? There are no guarantees because neither teacher has been around long enough for us to know. What’s the parent to do? Wait and see when he knows for a fact he can find the instruction he needs over the hill?
FOR THE LAST FIFTEEN YEARS I’ve asked why composition is not taught at any level in the schools in a comprehensive manner. Every year the response is, “Next item.” And thanks for keeping all this to yourself. We certainly wouldn’t want any discussion of the realities.
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