Hard to Sum Up
It's hard to sum up what you folks have said so far on what our school board should do, and what role it should play in our school district.
One point of view appears to be that the school board should not really do much of anything. It should select a great Superintendent and a first rate Treasurer, and then just set back and let them do their jobs.
At the other extreme, some think the school board should jump to the forefront, and think ''outside the box,'' so to speak. The board, getting ample public input from the rest of us along the way, should creatively identify all the options for dealing with all the major challenges that arise, and choose the one that, on balance, serves our interests best.
And then there are those who think that those who lead best really are followers of the people they lead. On this view, I guess, the school board should keep its ears to the ground and sense what the rest of us want, perhaps before we even know that we want it ourselves. The initiative must come from below, with those above simply being carried along by it. Leadership is the art of articulating what the followers want.
I'm not sure what to make of all this. There certainly was a time, not too far back, when most school board members did take the view that the board should hire qualified leaders to run the district, and then sit back, rubber-stamping administration requests. I sense something like that even in our current school board.
At least some of you must remember former Superintendent Dan Ross. In fact, some of you may have seen him at last night's Battle of 256. Dr. Ross was an extremely strong, personable and even inspiring leader, with a clearly articulated and ambitious vision for the future of the PLSD. He remembered the name of almost everyone he met, and could pick up conversations with people months later, almost where those conversations had left off.
The school board in those days was quite the opposite -- a real rubber stamp affair. Entire board meetings were consumed by the Superintendent's consent agenda, no one ever raised a question, the agenda was dominated by the administration, and nothing the administration proposed was ever voted down. Dan Ross spoke; the school board listened.
And yet Dr. Ross left the PLSD in frustration, and even disgust, after trying unsuccessfully for over a year to get us voters to approve a bond levy for to expand housing for grades 5-12, which most everyone agreed was needed. It even took him several tries to get us to approve a levy for the current Tussing Elementary, for which there was an even greater need.
Several members of the next school board actually tried to think outside the box, and took the view that the administration was responsible to the school board which, in turn, was responsible to us voters. There was a new emphasis on fiscal responsibility, and in taking seriously the budgetary appropriations process, which had become a sham under prior school boards. Those board members fared no better. One decided not to run for re-election, and the other tried not to run, but found no one willing to run to replace her. And that school board had no greater success in winning voter approval for levies than its predecessors.
Part of the problem, no doubt, is that the candidate pool for Ohio School Superintendents has virtually dried up. It's a killer job, or at least so its perceived, and those who remain in that job pool generally are not the folks a school district would want.
So where do we go from here? I look forward to your thoughts. I certainly don't have any answers.
By Yosemite Pam
