Do we want Barrett, Burney, Gentry and Hazouri picking our next superintendent

If there is any justice in the world these four will follow superintendent Pratt-Dannals out the door but in a huge twist of irony these four may also be responsible for choosing our next superintendent.

Here is a list of their accomplishments over the last year alone.

Let me start with pleading poverty while sitting on over 100 million dollars, ending programs and costing people their jobs.

This time last year we were talking about, a fifty thousand dollar speaker, a beach retreat and Duval Partners, the hand picked EMO that came and went.

Towards the end of summer, the district gave away control of four schools and two million dollars to Education Directions despite the fact they were granted an extra year to come up with solutions.

They created a summer reading program but turned it into expensive babysitting by putting to many poor readers in one class. Classes that should have had 8 kids in them ballooned to over 20.

The fall saw the school board allow the KIPP school to expand despite the fact in it’s first year it was the worse performing school in Northeast Florida, a contract with Teach for America to bring novice teachers to our inner city schools at 2,400 dollars a pop when local teachers and college of ed grads can’t find jobs and a vote to spend 300 thousand dollars on additional public relations positions.

In December we got some good news. Because of a scoring change many of our schools grades went up, unfortunately the district is now in a tizzy because a new new scoring change that will cause some of our schools grades to go down. Nobody taught the superintendent that you can’t have cake and eat it too.

In January the state ranked our district 50th out of 67 and pointed out that we have 8 of the bottom 25 high schools in the state, including number 404.

The federal government says we graduated just 63% of our students, 54% of our African American students. These numbers are undoubtedly inflated by grade recovery and the district’s Gentlemen’s C policy.

The debacle at Schools of the Future, money wasted, kids set back, equipment missing and the district with yet another “who me???” look on it’s face because of how they lost track of Schools of the Future.

I will throw in low teacher morale and a lack of discipline too.

With friends like these we don’t need enemies. Is the group that made these decisions the one we want picking our next superintendent?