It looks like earlier this school year, on March 25, our School Board approved a salary schedule change for the assistant superintendents that turned out to be 6.26 percent.

Only later did the School Board, after a couple of months, say “Oops” and then voted to rescind it. (See pdf below)

Pdf: Asst Super Salary Schedules

This action happened after the School District employees who were supposedly okay with it, came back saying they thought it was too much, that it was not fair to the other employees in the District.

The unions came to this conclusion after they had negotiated over 25 percent in raises in the last six years.

The School Board then voted to reduce the raise and only give the assistant supers a 3 percent raise followed by annual increases of 4 percent for the next four years and 3.5 percent for the next three after that.

This absurd reversal is the kind of leadership you get when Board members get too chummy with the employees and try to please everybody in the District.

When the Board is too beholden to the employees that they are overseeing and cannot finalize a decision until their “District partners” approve of it: For the sake of the partnership.

If the Board wanted to give the assistant administrators a 6 percent raise, so be it.

What? Did they forget to do the math?

Were they too busy to check on and know what they were really approving?

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to check on the percentage of the raise before passing it?

This is an embarrassment for the Board and the District. It makes it look as if they don’t know what’s going on under their noses. Too bad that the superintendent, their only employee, whom they just hired less than a year ago, had to take the fall for their very public failing.

In my private talks with Dr. Arnold, I got the feeling he had a financial philosophy of being tight with District’s unrestricted funding, unlike his predecessor.

Is that one of the reasons why Dr. Arnold was let go?

Did the District employees dislike his fiscal priorities?

Did they talk the School Board members into looking for someone else who would keep them fiscally first as a priority, instead of the students?

Mr. Laase may be contacted at GMLaase@aol.com