Administrative Hire

As many of you may or may not know, Eva Gale, the Supervisor of Curriculum of the Humanities, is retiring next month. At Monday's meeting, we voted to hire someone to fill the position.

Let's not kid ourselves. We all know there are drastic cuts that will need to be made in the budget due to the lack of state aid. But - let's also be realistic - there are some positions that are needed if we intend to educate our children, and this is one of them.

Here is a side story-
A few years ago my employer was based in Australia. We were a very small group here compared to Australia, but we had some incredible people in the US working for us. For years we knew that Australia would love nothing more than to sell us off - but what was holding them back were a few good people. So - their solution came almost four years ago - they would let everyone go with the exception of a core group of people in the US, and would give us a product of our own to work on. Basically - both the people and office would either fly or crash and burn - but they would have those few people around without the cost of a larger office.

What they did in the planning stages though was amazing. They picked out a few key managers - and went to them with the statement that if they were not on board with doing this, then the whole office would just close. Those managers then went to a few of the people they deemed as key to success and said the same thing. We were left with a group of 10 people who managed to provide more services than 35 had in previous years.

The moral of the story was the selection process. There are certain positions that, if eliminated, would be the demise of the organization. Many could have looked at it and said they could have kept more "workers" by letting the higher paid people go and not keeping the managers. The reality is that those managers and higher paid employees were the ones that were needed for success - and as a group I will tell you we were extremely successful.

Back to the school - and the administrator. Our Humanities and success in this area is crucial to us releasing educated children into the world. In the past year we have started seeing some breakthrough ideas which will help our children excel. Isn't that what we are here for?? Not to see if we can give education on the cheap - but to provide the children of the district with the best education we are able to?