One of the troubling things I heard this week was that the site committees set up to design new schools under the Red Plan were hijacked by administrators. Originally there was to be a two step process which allowed parents, teachers and members of the neighborhood to work with architects to come up with site designs. After this initial work was done the preliminary plans would be handed on to principals for their input.
What happened instead was that from the beginning the principals joined the site design process and in some, perhaps most, cases hijacked it by stacking the committees with their own appointees.
Dr. Dixon said at the PTSA meeting yesterday that all the site teams were moving swiftly. If they were all being pushed by school principals who were in turn being pushed by Dixon to accelerate the process to beat next year’s school board elections its not surprising that the process has run rough shod over community interests.
Dixon also told the PTSA that all his site teams wanted their construction to begin immediately. I also heard that Dr. Dixon saw to it that his principals got a nice raise in their most recent contract. Perhaps the desire to get each school’s construction underway reflects the desire of principals to make their boss happy more than it reflects their desire to please anybody else.
