The Golden Shovel award for 2014 goes to school board president Pam LeSesne. In her acceptance speech for the self-nominated Board of the Year award from WSSDA, she shaufelts the Pferdescheisse high and thick while the chamber echos in encomium, panegyric, and hyperbole. Since the current board is obviously too new to really credited with accomplishing much of anything (especially given their insistence that it takes a full six years to even learn the job in the first place), the only way to deflect the patent absurdity of this award is to accept it nominally while extending the true credit to the current boards predecessors. So, former board members were invited to come and share in the honor. Heres the roll call: Karen Madsen, Sue Cooper, Ed Petersen, and Jeff Russell. Anyone missing? (Perhaps a good-faith effort was made to be truly inclusive and this wasnt a snub -- did you even get a phone call, Jessica?) More disturbing -- and this is the part that really matters -- is that by doing this, LeSesne and the rest of the board are shoveling their recent past into an Orwellian memory hole. Normally, when reflecting on your past, you acknowledge the bumpy parts of the ride in light of your overall experience. Pretending that certain things just didnt happen at all is generally considered very bad form at best, and downright terrifying at worst. Remember that this is the same school board that will decide on a new social studies curriculum later in 2015; they will be making the decision on what, and how, history is taught to our districts children. Hopefully the members of the curriculum selection committee are approaching their task with a more responsible attitude than what were seeing here.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 20:19:31 +0000