A Program We Can't Afford: The State Funded Internship for Principals

Recently, when the Office of Financial Management released their Priorities of Government report detailing what they thought should and should not be funded in the coming legislative session, one of the lowest priority items for education spending was the state funded Education Leadership Intern Program which provides a grant for paid release days for aspiring principals and superintendents to step out of the classroom and spend time working on their internships.

To my mind, cutting the program is the right thing to do when we're looking at a $6 billion dollar budget hole. There's no evidence that I've seen that Washington State has a principals shortage; similarly, I've yet to hear of a district unable to find a superintendent. Sure, it only cost slightly more than $1.4 million dollars in the last bienium, but that's not really the point--if we're going to be looking at every program in an honest way, and if the Priorities of Government is to mean anything, then there's an awful lot more that should avoid the axe before the Internship Program.

Trick is, that hasn't stopped OSPI from posting the application for next year's grant program, even though the grant program isn't statuatory and could go away any time. The Association of Washington School Principals acknowledges this truth on their website, saying that the grant applications will be considered "null and void" should the program not be funded, but at the same time they've made it one of their legislative priorities for the coming session.

This seems like an easy cut. I kind of hate to see it go, since I got one of those grants last year, but it's the right thing to do.

The Joys of Leadership

In Hoquiam, the School Board's terrible evaluation of the school Superintendent made for a great newspaper article over the weekend.

The evaluation said the superintendent has a “shoot first and ask questions later” attitude, accused him of not respecting women in the workplace, described him as a micro-manager and said his leadership style is the equivalent of “Do what I say, not what I do.”

“There is no defending the negative issues presented in this evaluation,” it states. “Unfortunately, I think that these situations had a direct correlation on at least two board members and one business manager leaving,” one School Board member wrote.

And in another case of an internal matter getting out and getting messy, Burlington-Edison High School will soon be looking for a new principal after the Superintendent drove off the old one:

The disclosure came amid signs of conflict between VanderVeen and district Superintendent Rick Jones that emerged at a faculty and staff meeting at the high school Wednesday morning.

At the meeting, teachers report Jones as having said that VanderVeen had only one year left at the school because she refused to take a different job within the school district.

Jones initially denied that he had put a one-year timeline on VanderVeen’s tenure at the high school. But this morning, after hearing several teachers’ account of the meeting, he sent an email to staff members at the high school acknowledging the comment.

“I misspoke and I apologize for the confusion I caused,” Jones wrote in the email. “It was not my intent or that of the school board to quantify the time Beth would be at the school.”

“I totally had not intended for that to be the message,” Jones told the Skagit Valley Herald this morning. “In the emotion of things, I didn’t choose my words as appropriately as I should have.”

Elsewhere, Tacoma is narrowing down the field in its search for a new superintendent. Read the article, and also check out the surprisingly nice candidate profiles that the News Tribune did. A note to the field: this is pat on the back they use to find a place to put the knife.

Finally, there's the Aberdeen High School principal who was a leader on Friday, went home for the night, and turned in his letter of resignation on Saturday. When someone doesn't finish the year like that, you can assume there's a lot of inner turmoil going on.