Guns N’ Roses
School Board member Rhonda Lennon drew some strange looks at last week’s meeting when she started shooting from the hip with gun metaphors during a budget debate.
“We cannot continue to have bullets in our arsenal and not put them in the gun,” Lennon said, supporting a proposal to study the outsourcing of some CMS services like busing. Later in the evening, Lennon let everyone know, “I have the gun the back in the holster.”
Now for the roses, which Lennon lavished on Superintendent Peter Gorman and his Ed Shed fiefdom.
“I would like to highlight something, Dr. Gorman, that I’m not sure you highlighted enough,” Lennon said, “because I keep getting this in all these e-mails about all of our layers of management and all the waste we have at central office.”
Simply not true, Lennon opined, pointing out that of Gorman’s recommended $100 million in cuts, the first tier of reductions included $8.7 million to central office.
“Let’s start talking with facts here, instead of PR and propaganda that’s not reality,” Lennon chided. “The first few cuts that are being made are in central office, building services, and non-classroom cuts. I just have to make that point.”
It wasn’t the first time Lennon has stuck up for CMS’ bloated bureaucracy. Last year she balked when board member Kaye McGarry pitched a proposal to save millions of dollars by dismantling the district’s administrative-heavy learning community outposts.
“We hire Dr. Gorman to determine how he thinks he can best manage his staff, to have the layers of management between him and 170 schools,” Lennon rationalized at the time. “To think he could possibly supervise those – we have 180 days during the school year. I guess, Dr. Gorman, that means you and [Chief Academic Officer] Ann Clark could visit each school one time. That’s how much supervision those schools would have.”
Nope, no extra layers of management there; none at all.
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