The Thin Red Line

...the one that separates political advocacy from representing your school.

The split came to mind when I read this article from the Yakima Herald. The Yakima City Council was set to take up a motion to endorse the school levy issue they ran last month (and passed with better than 60% of the vote), but before they approved it in a 6-0 vote there was a good discussion about whether the city council even had any business taking sides in a matter like school levies.

To my mind, I think they should, and they did the right thing. The health of the schools directly impacts the health of the city, and by taking a stand for the levy the city council was properly exercising their authority.

What's interesting to me is what happened next:

Soria was so upset with the council's impromptu and very public squabble over the levy during a hearing two weeks before the Feb. 19 election that he sent letters afterwards to three members of the council who had questioned the process of endorsements.

Obtained by the Herald-Republic, the letters show that Soria was especially unhappy with Councilman Rick Ensey.

"Your public comments with regard to the ... Maintenance and Operation Levy border on recklessness and callousness," Soria wrote.

The superintendent also got after Councilman Bill Lover, intimating the council might have hurt the levy's chances by engaging in a dispute while voters were deciding the issue in the mail-only election.

"A person sitting at home viewing the proceedings and/or reading about it in the newspaper would immediately wonder, if the City Council cannot publicly as a body support the Maintenance and Operation Levy for the district, there must be something wrong," Soria wrote in his letter to Lover.

To me this just seems like bad politics on Soria's part. No institution, not even the schools, is above deliberation, and the conversation at the city council meeting was more about the process than the actual levy issue itself. Calling the councilmembers reckless and callous just for having a discussion seems silly; it looks more like a bully trying to force his will than a reasonable person having a conversation, and that's not a good impression to give.

As superintendent I know Dr. Soria is uniquely positioned in his district, in that he's the only one who can engage in the political process on the job and get away with it. Here, though, I think he went a bridge too far.

Contracts: Meh!

Sometimes it really does pay to read the whole article.

The Wednesday edition of the Yakima Herald had this article that talked about the top legislative priorities for area superintendents in the coming legislative session. The three they decided to focus on:

*Students who have not met state standards in reading and writing from the class of 2008, 2009 and 2010 may graduate from high school without an Certificate of Academic Achievement or a Certificate of Individual Achievement. Similar to the requirement for those who have not met the math standard, additional coursework in reading and writing would be required.

* Provide resources to extend student-teacher contact time for high-poverty schools and schools serving high numbers of students whose primary language is not English, who are known as English language learners.

* Initiate legislation to require cultural competence and language acquisition training for all new certified teachers in the state.

Well and good. It's the piece later on in the article that raises an eyebrow:

The superintendents also did not move forward with their proposal to grant some schools with override authority of negotiated teacher contracts because it was deemed too controversial and not feasible at this time.

Several Yakima teachers spoke out against this specific recommendation during a Tuesday night board meeting where Soria presented the final recommendations.

"How does this help students?" asked Aaron McCausland, a science teacher at Davis High School.

Administrators grumble about the contracts with the teachers. It's just the way of the world, a death and taxes sort of thing. Administrators getting together and developing a plan to get around the contract, a plan that they considered taking to the legislature? That's interesting. Interesting indeed.

Consider, too, that Yakima county was the worst in the state when it came to passing the Simple Majority, only slightly better than Garfield County which is 1/45th its size. There's obviously a lot of animosity in Yakima County towards the schools; are the superintendents trying to deflect that onto the unions?