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| Citizens participate in the first of five community forums for gathering input and ideas to help the ECSD hire their first appointed superintendent of schools |
The Escambia School District will be hiring our area's first "appointed" superintendent of schools next year--which the voters authorized in last year's election. And this "change" is a great thing in my opinion! (One I have long supported)
Ahead of this historic transformation, however, the school board has scheduled a number of public input sessions so that feedback from the community can be forwarded to the school board on a very important matter: What type of person does our school district need?
This is a topic of particular import right now, and quite timely.
(The NAS Pensacola CO has made news with his reasonable requests and comments about the quality of schools near NAS Pensacola currently. These comments drew a very supportive editorial from our daily newspaper--supporting our CO of NAS Pensacola and excoriating our current elected superintendent of schools.)
The first meeting for community input was bootstrapped right behind an already scheduled meeting of area schools' advisory councils. Although the meeting was advertised to begin at 5:30--when I arrived early at 5:20 I found a closed door at the meeting venue with the meeting already in progress.
I asked at the door as I signed in "Wasn't this supposed to start at 5:30?" to which I was told by the ECSD Public Affairs spokesman "They just started a few minutes ago, right after the school advisory committee meeting ended."
I was directed to join one of the 11 tables of 5-8 citizens already formed in the meeting hall. Each table spoke among one another to find answers to the following three questions, (paraphrased from memory) in this order:
1. What are the district's current strong points?
2. What are the district's big challenges?
3. What qualities, attributes should our first appointed superintendent possess?
I found a seat at the table that had folks from Lipscomb Elementary school.
So the meeting was a hybrid focus group/brainstorming session, with each small group table answering questions and then sharing answers with the entire crowd. At the conclusion of the question creation part of the meeting---the answers to each main question were hung on the wall-at which point every individual attendee was permitted to identify/signify his/her top four (4) most important answers to the questions on the large sheets of paper on the wall. This was accomplished via placement of individual stickers on these questions by each attendee--with only four stickers given to the participants. The logic behind this is/was so that the FSBA facilitator can take the raw data and participant selections--prioritized by the number of stickers beside each question--and sort this data from most to least important and provide this information to the school board (who were not present at the meeting)
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| Citizens participate in the first of five community forums for gathering input and ideas to help the ECSD hire their first appointed superintendent of schools |
From my perspective and from what I overheard--some of the most pressing priorities from the group were as follows:
1. The need for a better discipline process and a more rapid removal of violent and aggressive students — without months of observations and endless checklists
2. The need to bring the data clerks back to the individual schools
3. The need to hire an experienced professional educator with admin experience and a track record of success with areas of generational poverty
4. The need to hire someone who is not an insider or beholden to local monied interests and the good old boy network.
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