It has been frustrating watching the Santa Ana Unified School District slip into a bottomless pit, but news came out of Washington, D.C. today that should serve as an inspiration to families in the SAUSD. “Ninety-eight D.C. school system employees were fired yesterday as part of Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee‘s effort to establish a “culture of accountability” by sweeping out unproductive and unneeded workers at the central office.”
Wow! Now that’s what we need to do at SAUSD – clean house of lame administrators! If D.C. can do it, so can we. I hope this will become a campaign issue in the fall elections.
The fired administrators in D.C. were escorted out by police officers and security guards. What I would give to see SAUSD Superintendent Jane Russo and her cronies hauled off by the police…
You can read the rest of the D.C. story at this link.
Well, if you are going to compare SAUSD with other districts, why not include a district that is just a short trip away, like IUSD?
Here is a message that was sent out on the current state budget crisis. Look at the tone, content and overall focus on the statement and contrast it with the response from SAUSD:
http://www.iusd.k12.ca.us/IUSDBudgetWatch.html
California policymakers initially billed 2008 as
A closer look at the DC story reveals that people across the board were terminated, not just administrators. The person doing the firing was the Russo of that district. Thus I doubt you will see much of a similar movement at SAUSD. In fact they just hired a new administrator from CUSD as reported on this blog.
When you have department after department loaded with both administrative secretaries and executive secretaries, assistants, managers, directors, assistants to the assistants and so forth, you won’t see any administrators escorted out the door.
After watching the district for two decades the best you can hope for is a few administrators will retire and will be labeled as cuts. If push comes to shove a few will be reassigned to a school and labeled as reductions in the district office. Once the heat is off these people will be quietly transferred back.
It’s sad to say but it happens so often that three janitors making $30k a year will get the boot rather than on administrator making $100k.
A purfect spot for this comment, as an Administrator assures a School Board that cutting back security to 11-months at the schools will have no effect. I guess since he won’t have to deal with the actions that take place in and around our schools it doesn’t really matter. Like a fellow blogger said let go of a DSO or Police Officers pay before you release an administrator or two
Jane Russo cannot afford to let go of any administrators or secretaries. She relies on them too much. If you need an answer or a decision, she gets busy and delegates those to anyone else but herself.
She uses massive layers of personnel to cover for her own inaction and fear.
Secretaries act as junior administrators, so that the highly paid administrators don’t have to accept responsibility for correspondence or other functions of accountability.
Santa Ana is paying high prices for third rate services. May as well knock down Russo’s, Olsky’s, Boden’s and Lopez’s salaries down to those of the secretaries. That’s really the only level of “leadership” the district is getting anyways.