The mayor’s constant attempts to co-opt and to coerce Superintendent of Schools Fred Foresteire into seeing things the way he does and demanding that he do things without consulting him first, is bad strategy, and bad politics.
If the mayor wishes to gain concessions from Foresteire or for Foresteire to gain concessions from the mayor, they need to meet before official public meetings take place.
They need to discuss options and ways to move forward without either of them feeling that the other has been had in the public forum.
We find it amazing that the mayor continues to make fiscal and political demands of
Foresteire which are largely futile because one doesn’t have control over the other in the city the way it is run today.
And a last thought about all the jockeying going on between these two – when it comes to the public schools, nearly every mayor past and the mayor present have underfunded the public schools leading to nearly annual requests for more funding from the school department which are frankly, excruciating.
The 100 teachers and staff laid off recently from the public schools is not the doing of the public schools, it is the doing of the mayor.
The mayor’s constitutional inability to fully fund the public schools reveals his inability to understand just how important
the public schools are to the thousands of working class and poverty class students attending them.
The public schools here are their only chance at getting up and out.
Foresteire understands this. If there is nobility in the man, then it is centered in his belief that the underfunded budget shouldn’t and can’t be paid attention to – that the kids deserve everything they can get.
The mayor needs to get it about education.
The mayor and the superintendent need to hash out their differences behind closed doors and then slap one another on the back at public meetings showing that acting together is much preferred to what is going on presently.