Over the past four years I have attended almost all of the Cleveland County School Board meetings and workshops. I sit up close to the stage in the Roger Holland renovated Central Services Auditorium and still have problems hearing. I keep on wondering about those new auditoriums for 50 year old Burns and Crest High Schools that School Board Chairman Phillip “Bully” Glover talks about but knows there is no money to build them. The School Board made sure that money was spent somewhere else. We certainly don’t need two more auditoriums like the one at the Central Services anyway. Just like we don’t need a new $16 million North Shelby School that the School Board is too ashamed of to let me take a look at it during construction.
During these past four years of observation as well as receiving information from before this, the problem issues at Cleveland County Schools come under the following major headings, with different details and combinations:
1. Sex Scandals
2. Fraud and misapplication of funds
3. Waste
4. Ineffective leadership at both CCS management and school board levels
5: Cover-ups for all of the above
I was not able to personally attend the August 28, 2017 School Board meeting, but I watched the video on the CCS website. The CCS video people have done a relatively good job and now include close-ups of the Board Members as they speak. It was watching this video that I realized just how effective and pertinent Board Member Danny Blanton’s “Gomer Pyle” style questions are and how the rest of the school board and the superintendent, Dr. Stephen Fisher, struggle trying to keep the cover-ups covered up. Especially during this school board election year.
The first example was regarding the Personnel Report. Danny Blanton noted, as he has many times, that there is a very high rate of teacher resignations at CCS and suggested the Board look into this. Blanton correctly stated “it costs a lot of money to train so many new teachers” to fill the slots where experienced teachers have resigned. Blanton asked why has CCS not asked those resigning why they are resigning and try to correct any system problems that might have occurred that caused so many departures? This is a simple question, like I said, a “Gomer Pyle” style simple question, but has always gotten the same reply. Or I should say a lack of a reply. Watching the video, I recognized the MO. Dr. Fisher, at the boards request for an answer (the rest of the Board never has an answer), but goes into what I will call his “Fast Talking Mode.” Lots and lots of words, coming fast, but no wisdom. No answers either. Fisher says “maybe the teacher’s spouse gets transferred,” maybe they do this, maybe they do that, maybe, maybe, maybe. Then follows up with “our turnover rate is right in line with everybody else’s turnover rate.” Therefore we don’t need to do anything. And they don’t. And the rest of the board members, especially Kathy Falls and Bully Glover, who, along with Danny Blanton, are up for re-election this year, are fine with doing nothing and not knowing why. Fisher’s fast talking Gobbledy-Goop is good enough for them. But not for me and any other person who gives a whit about the goings on at CCS.
