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Sandy's avatar

I agree with you on this. I was not implying that the public should be involved in staffing outside the Superintendent--and actually the Board shouldn't be involved either (didn't we have some issue with Joey getting involved in a principal who had a dispute with Horton or Turner?).

The Board hires the Superintendent and that person runs the day-to-day ops.

But of course it is totally legit to question Board/Superintendent decisions--whether they relate to hiring, capital improvements, curriculum, etc...

One byproduct of the opaque and non-transparent Chief Executive hiring process is that you are not going to necessarily have the trust of the public when you make decisions.

The first thing I did when Horton was announced as superintendent was to google his name. The first hit that came up was the NBC report saying he owed tens of thousands of dollars to the City of Chicago. I was like, "why the hell would they hire this guy?" Then you look at his resume: never been a superintendent, never worked in a community like Evanston, etc. I think many people in town were mystified.

So, yes, this guy is going to get a bunch of scrutiny. And I think those of us who had concerns about his experience and ethics were vindicated by his poor leadership, financial mismanagement, and incompetence. Then when you have identity politics grifters like Biz chalking up all parent/taxpayer concerns to "structural racism", you've pretty much shown you're a bad actor without concern for the actual education of the kids.

Fast forward to the Turner search: the Board followed the exact same closed process! The Board squandered an opportunity to build trust and--maybe--even have a better search outcome that could be informed by public input. Nope. Instead they hired one of Horton's deputies who similarly had no experience as a superintendent, was on the "do-not-hire" list at CPS for hiding her income in order to get her kid free lunch and had the OIG chiding her for a failure to catch the falsification of attendance records.

Again, the normal response should be, 'why the hell would they hire her? Was she really the best candidate"? Of course we don't know if she is the best candidate because of the secretive nature of the search.

I have nothing against the new Orrington principal. But any major decision coming from District leadership has to be scrutinized given the background and track record of the Board & Admin.

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