The School Superintendent Choice Committee, led by School Chair Thomas Abruzzese are holding sham meetings this week for the public to interview the final choices for the open superintendent’s position.
Without the three “Everett” finalists being interviewed – excluded by a incoherent exclusionary process – the interviewing of the alleged “finalists” is a fraud at worst, and a symptom of much greater political involvement in the process than is warranted and should not be allowed.
Chair Abruzzese has shown a constitutional inability to let people think on their own. His admonition when the choice process was at its very beginning – “no local candidates allowed over my dead body” – proves how Abruzzesse’s hatred for the School Department’s leadership and certain administrators make it impossible for him to lead the choice committee.
This puts in question as well his aptitude for leadership of the School Committee.
This stunted and discriminatory choice process is also an indictment of a School Committee that has absolutely nothing to say of substance in response to the outrage sweeping certain communities concerned mainly with public education within the city.
It is a vote of the School Committee and the School Committee alone to officially hire the next superintendent.
There are presently more than several members of the School Committee who would like to publicly interview the local candidates being denied – or to order the choice committee to do the same.
The School Committee can, and probably should, name the next superintendent and vote to confirm him irrespective of what Abruzzese’s true intentions are in this hopelessly political choice process.
All it takes is one member making a motion to allow the locals to be interviewed publicly, and then a second and then a vote on the matter with five affirmatives and it is done – over Abruzzese’s protest or not.
The mayor’s intervention is an absolute necessity.
With his intervention, the School Committee will act. This is a guarantee.
If the mayor advocated for Dr. Omar Easy, one of those who applied and qualifies as an educator to lead this city’s public school system, he would need to speak with each member of the School Committee to make his wishes known.
Will he do this?
We don’t know but he should. Continuity is most important in this situation. Maintaining the high level of qualified local administrative leadership in the school community is paramount.
We urge the School Committee to join with the mayor to take a direct hold of this out of control superintendent choice process.
Despite their hollow protests insisting they know what they are doing, the members of the Choice Committee have not a morsel of understanding about what they are doing.
This is apparent in those local qualified candidates they have excluded from the process made worse by those inferior choices they have decided on for final balloting.
Also complicit in this ongoing embarrassment is the state agency overseeing the process.
Their support of such a skewered exclusionary and discriminatory choice process is suspect.
We suggest the agency’s aid to the Choice Committee is perfunctory.
They need to explain how they agree it is positive for a choice committee to exclude local qualified candidates over a slate of lesser non-local candidates.
We don’t need exhortations of great vision by a slate of finalists that have not served an hour or a day collectively or individually as a superintendent.
We need solid professionalism, commitment, an understanding of this city and its people and organizations, its political leadership and its school department administrative leadership and its school teachers and staff and its students.
Above all, we need continuity to keep the ball rolling.