Roy Exum: Thanks A Lot For Nothing

  • Sunday, September 25, 2016
  • Roy Exum
Roy Exum
Roy Exum

Somebody should have gotten an award last Tuesday when a 90-minute “education summit” involving our school leaders, politicians and media produced absolutely nothing. Zilch. Zero. Oh, there are a number of candidates we could give an award for “nothing,” both in our school district and on its fringes. Yet to find Tennessee Commissioner of Education Candice McQueen brought her high-and-mighty self from her tarnished tower in Nashville to rebuke us for our failures in our iZone school is an affront to all intelligence. If any one of our teachers were to grade the worth of Tuesday’s meeting, they would easily give it an “F,” only because “G,” “H” and “Z” are still unavailable.

Twenty dignitaries, about half pretenders as proven by our most-recent results in education, sat with good manners and tight lips as her Ladyship graced the VW meeting room with the moronic line, “Create your plan around the right vision, have some metrics, and align the right goals, and make sure your human capital is attached to that.”

My goodness, how astute. We could apply that to absolutely anything … to the thriving Calvary Chapel church, to Unum as it searches for poverty in India, to Mayor Andy Berke’s re-election signs or the McCallie football team during the week the Blue Tornado faces Baylor. If you stepped in late, it may best apply to the state Department of Education’s response last year during a horribly-botched testing debacle where the entire state was assured, “Really, it was no one’s fault.”

The state Department of Education is a famously-known bureaucratic boondoggle. Ask any educator in the state’s 95 counties and they all have stories. The biggest is money, or lack of. Tennessee teachers are 32nd in the nation at the pay window. Governor Bill Haslam is showing good signs, but he still doesn’t get it. Yet the best answer is easy – start with the students. You’ll quickly deduce “if mama ain’t happy nobody’s happy.” We have no option other than to lift our teachers every bit as high as we want our children to be. Hello?

Lady McQueen moaned about the fact that the state has sent $13 extra million to Hamilton County for our dying iZone schools but whatever did she expect? Please, our all-knowing state officials handed the cash to a supremely dysfunctional HCDE and an equally out-to-lunch school board and -- what! -- just now the PhD’s are wondering why it didn’t work?

I can sympathize to some degree with the school board which was shamefully kept in the total dark but, lordy, don’t you think that just one school boarder drawing $1,000 a month from the taxpayers might have sought a light switch? I have never in my life seen a fiasco to equal our school’s overall operation as I uncovered for myself last spring, excluding of course our nation’s Congress and Senate.

Now Interim Superintendent Kirk Kelly is assuring the state commissioner HCDE is “right on track” and “we have been aware and are looking to help our priority schools,” and he “hopes” our test scores will reflect that years from now. Thunder from heaven! That’s almost as blatantly ridiculous as McQueen’s visit. It is also a total and complete falsehood.

I have no doubt our “poor schools” may be getting a harder look but actually very few deck hands; when the school board just slipped Ooltewah a cool million for a girls soccer field you can bet your Title IX coupon that not a single iZone school was ever accorded such a luxury, much less anywhere near that for a much-greater necessity. Are you kidding me? Last year the HCDE was so shoddy it didn’t even spend what was appropriated for the iZone schools. To me that is grounds for firing due to negligence but at HCDE it’s just another cup of coffee.

Today the standard line is “when we get our new superintendent we’ll be able to fix that.” What a bunch of bunk! The time to fix broken things is when they break! At the rate our ever-cautious school board is moving, a permanent superintendent is still light years away so I am suggesting an action committee of no more than three heavyweights to seek five urgent solutions, all of which could actually be achieved by the end of (this) October:

SATURDAY SCHOOLS -- Effective as soon as possible, let’s “experiment” (that way we aren’t burdened by political hysteria) at all five iZone schools. The only way to get our deserving kids out of a ditch is to help them get out. Quit sitting on your hands! Every Saturdays we have an optional day of school that will begin with a “work hour,” where the students take pride in tidying up ‘their’ school.

Then we show one of the greatest movies of all time to half of them while the other half reads. Then the next two hours everybody changes seats. We have ice cream with lunch. The children have somewhere to go that’s safe. Teachers get paid double. I know teachers need rest, that they are overworked, so I am prepared to give them the double-pay option or they can be off on a given Saturday to watch the Mocs with their squeeze.

That means we’ll pay any UTC education major (or at any nearby college) cash-on-the-beer-keg every time they work a Saturday school. Make sure the college students get in-school credit but if one is late they fail the semester. (No, we don’t provide the beer, just the ready cash to buy it from their under-age bootlegger. See, everybody wins.)

I’ve got a dozen reasons why this is smart thinking but let me give you a cautionary tip: When word gets around that Saturday school is available in certain locations, watch the number of kids whose parents will want to be included. No parent from any ethnic or eco-social group wants a child who cannot read.

Okay, everybody is going to cry, “We can’t afford it.” Rubbish! With $13 extra million in just the last three years, I know 20,000 mothers who could figure out a budget for Saturday school at their kitchen table within an hour. Why our every-groggy HCDE cannot figure it out … I fear we now know.

TEACHER’S SALARY – Governor Haslam can do something about that next week if he so wishes. Ditto the legislature. Raise the salaries, raise the performance level. “Be good or be gone.” Say it however you want – that “Education is our top priority” -- but to be No. 32 among all the states is proof to a lie. Teachers’ salaries are shameful and degrading to these professional people, most especially with the level of lip service education is getting these days. Tell me how much you need and we’ll send a handful of kitchen-table mommas to slash the fat at both the state and local Departments of Education. Bingo.

COUNSELING – Every school in our county system has kids carrying a burden. It is long past time for us to address the “total student. We should establish a “friend” program where a child who is scared, ashamed, unkempt or otherwise unable to focus on learning can sit quietly with an adult “friend,” one with apt skills, so that child can talk to someone who listens.

Our iZone schools have harsh issues at home, from lack of food to lack of love, and until we address it just as harshly, you are beaten before you begin. Realize it’s tougher for most of these children to get on base, much less hit a home run, so before you try to water your plants get the kinks out of the hose.

Our inner-city schools, iZone, poor, whatever … are prominently filled with minorities. We have a glorious opportunity to add a couple of additional uniformed Resource Officers at each iZone school as fast as we can get the emergency money. Look around, see the problems minorities are having with police?

If we can instill an equal respect, a friendship between our youngest children and a cop who will play basketball with them after lunch, we can win a war everybody else seems to be losing. Again you bemoan costs but what has this week cost Charlotte? Our in-school behavior will be better, our safety factor with gang members on the sidewalks will improve, and our “awareness” for the children will increase.

We have to teach our children that law enforcement people will keep them safe and are their friends. Even our littlest need to learn that immediately, as I can prove in another America city next week and the week after. With education we can prevent such lunacy. I’m telling you, an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. And there is this: Give first “moon-lighting” dibs to our underpaid city of Chattanooga Police and our county’s Sheriff deputies. They are so underpaid their own children already qualify for free lunches.

COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT – I had a great visit with newly-elected school board member Kathy Lennon last week and she told me about a woman who goes to a nearby school every day and sits quietly on the steps. Finally somebody asked her what on earth she was doing and the lady was honest. “Using your WiFi.” My goodness, let her use the library!

Kathy has this delicious vision of “community school” where we would actually unlock the doors and let those in the community use our libraries and become active in our schools. Yes, I can hear every principal groaning but our School Resource Officers would police the visitors. Our community involvement at our iZone schools is next-to-nothing.

What if we invited people in? What if we could provide a GED teacher to teach a specific class for anyone in the Brainerd area who needs a high school diploma to get a job? That’s public education, right.

And if a rabble-rouser or two shows up, they will immediately be jailed without bond, their case heard that very same day, and their mandatory sentence in a desperately over-crowded workhouse long enough to assure they never do something that stupid ever again.

Our schools must come down fiercely against troublemakers of any age; the lack-of-discipline in HCDE is far worse than bullying, believe it or not. We need a “get tough” policy where we throw the bums out.

AFTER-SCHOOL FUN – There needs to be a way for any child to have fun after school. An emphasis should be on sports – particularly as an alternative to suspensions – but I’ve always been of the mind that an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. Bright School, one of the best elementary schools in the South, teaches “shop.” Why? The kids love it, be it a bird house or a Christmas ornament.

We ought to have some games, magic lessons, tennis lessons, karate ... our teachers are geniuses with their insights on what a child would like to do instead of going home with nothing to do. Going to school needs to be fun. Missing out on the laughs of dodge-ball or learning how to play chess needs to be an agony every child will feel if they are absent. Mark these words … make school a joy and the test scores will reflect it. I’ll guarantee it.

* * *

Just so you’ll know, the school board in Birmingham, Ala., fired their school superintendent after just one year Thursday night. Her buyout will cost $400,000 over the next two years, this at a public school system that just spent $2.5 million for a reading initiative that has yet to provide the schools with any books. Sound like anywhere you know?

* * *

The very next time anyone -- from anywhere -- disrupts the important peoples’ day with a 90-minute scolding that we all know much more about than the accuser, please drag the idiot to a tattoo shop and order these words in purple ink on said dolt’s forearm: “Create your plan around the right vision, have some metrics, and align the right goals, and make sure your human capital is attached to that.”

God forbid Tennessee’s Education Commissioner McQueen ever try to teach anyone to change a tire.

royexum@aol.com

Latest Headlines
Opinion
Democratic View On Top State Senate Issues - March 18, 2024
  • 3/18/2024

Campbell bill seeks to save lives by studying suicide trends in Tennessee 3 p.m. Senate Regular Calendar — SB 1787 , by Sen. Heidi Campbell, would require state health officials to produce ... more

The Odor Of Mendacity - And Response (2)
  • 3/16/2024

The Fulton County judge, Scott McAfee, overseeing the Fani Willis prosecution of Donald Trump and eighteen other defendants has spoken. In response to a motion by defendants to remove Willis ... more

Capitol Report From State Rep. Greg Vital For March 15
  • 3/15/2024

General Assembly confirms new Tennessee State Supreme Justice Members of the General Assembly confirmed the appointment of Mary L. Wagner to the Tennessee Supreme Court in a joint session ... more