Personal Thoughts from a Veteran Educator
Seems legit…
My favorite parts are the email addresses. I guess he had to take “jbcomeyfbidirector12@usa.com” because jbcomeyfbidirector 1 through 11 were already taken. And of course the Remittance Director (?) at SunTrust Bank is going to use an aol.com address, because why not?
But at least I’m going to get USD 10.3M) from the “Monitory” Crime Division. Yes this is seeming very Englishy good nothing to be suspectful here of.
It must be exhausting to be Marsha Sutton. Here it is May 2017, and she is still upset about Rick Schmitt’s salary.
At the time, his SDUHSD salary was $238,329, which was set to go up to $248,347 on July 1. At San Ramon, where he started his employment on July 1, his contracted starting salary was $309,664.
“At the time” was June 2016, nearly a year ago. Rick Schmitt doesn’t even work for SDUHSD any more, and she spends half of her column about him and his salary?
This $6.5 million expense for salaries and benefits across the board will continue each subsequent year. (These figures, however, do not take into account the number of highly paid veteran employees who are retiring.)
“All those highly-paid veteran teachers, with their free apples and all!”
No one would have objected to a reasonable contracted salary increase.
I call bullshit. I think Marsha Sutton would have objected to any settlement with the teacher’s association that didn’t result in teachers being flogged in public.
Schmitt said the district has a history of being fiscally conservative, and that there is money to pay for these raises well into the future, based on healthy reserves, conservative assumptions and realistically rosy projections.
Even if all that is true, which is suspect, did the raises need to be so high, at 12.5 percent?
“Here is someone who knows what they are talking about. But even if they do, I’m going to ignore it. Why do raises need to be so high? Oh, you just explained that? Wait, where am I?”
Assuming scads of cash were just lying around, as Schmitt claimed, could at least some of it have been spent on hiring more teachers to reduce class sizes? More security? The arts? Relieving parents of the pressure to donate to foundations to fund classroom essentials?
Given the tragedy at Torrey Pines High School last week, how about additional counselors?
Did you REALLY just suggest that raises for teachers (“scads of cash”) led, even indirectly, to a 15-year-old’s suicide? Fuck you. I’m done being clever here. Marsha, go get some help, and let the professionals in school districts do what they do best. And you go do whatever it is you do best. I don’t know what that is, but it has nothing to do with writing or education.
It was my college roommate, Matt Ford, who introduced me to the music of the Grateful Dead. I remember listening to Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty and hearing the harmony and beauty in the music. Listening to Aoxomoxoa and hearing “China Cat Sunflower” made me feel like I had known the song all my life, even though it was the first time I had ever heard it.
The summer after my freshman year was 1987. The Dead released their first album in six years, In the Dark, which included their only charted single, “Touch of Grey”. I had also met Julie that year, and had gone to visit her in Tucson during the summer of 1987. I can remember driving around Tucson in her yellow Datsun, listening to her brother’s radio station KRQ, and talking about the new Grateful Dead album. Not that she cared at all about the Grateful Dead; she was showing interest in me and my interests. I was 18 years old and oblivious to such subtleties.
I was playing that song again tonight, and remembered back to those days. I thought, “Wow, that song came out in 1987. That was 20 years ago! … Wait, no … that can’t be right … 30 years ago?!?!”
“Oh well, a touch of grey, kind of suits you anyway…”
That line has a lot more meaning for me now than it did when I was 18.