Bev Hall's clay feet

Bev Hall has won a lot of awards and a lot of recognition, and she did take a school district that was as bad as a big metro district can be and, in nine years, bring it up to the level of so-so. Don't laugh, that's a big accomplishment. But don't get too excited, either, because your kid is going to school in a district that, at very best, is so-so.

And you probably hoped for better.

This is one of my pet peeves, so digress for just a moment. Being much, much better than you were nine years ago is not the same thing as being great. APS is not great. It's not even very good.

And yet when you start whining about some small item such as, for example, the district's addiction to breaking every possible corner of the IDEA law when it comes to IEPs, here's what you hear--it's like a mantra, a chant:

"But we have come SUCH a long way--nine years of continuous upward progress!"

Well, it may sound ungracious but I don't care how you are now relative to what a radioactive mess you were during the Bill Campbell administration. I only care how you are now relative to what I need you to be for my kid.


Anyway, let me get back to Bev Hall. My first problem with her is that she's a bureaucrat with a capital B. Evidence: during the selection process for our new principal at Springdale Park, she placed the interests of the bureaucracy and--yes, all of the job applicants-- ahead of the interests of the parents. That's exactly backwards. If any of you want to see my dissection of that process and its many flaws, I'll be happy to share those documents with you.

(Luckily for us, we got a great principal despite the process. But it should have happened because we participated in the actual decision, not just as sworn-to-secrecy "consultants" with no voting power).

My second problem with her--and this is a big one--is that when confronted with substantial evidence of test-score cheating by APS teachers, her first instinct was to protect the accused, not to move quickly to protect the parents and the kids who were the victims of this increasingly common crime.

Even Gov. Perdue called Hall's stance "outrageous," saying "any reasonable person" could see cheating had occurred. This criticism would have had more bite to it were Perdue not a bible-thumping, beer-hating moron himself.

Hall has now moved to correct this egregious lapse of judgment, but it comes too late for me. Her first obligation as superintendent is not to protect her felonious employees. It's to protect children and reassure parents. The appropriate response would have been to condemn the cheating immediately, promise due process to those accused of it, but acknowledge the overwhelming evidence rather than dispute it.

Instead, she reacted like it was just impossible anyone working for her could be a crook.

What hubris. There are all sorts of deadbeats and cheats still working for APS. Two of them have worked on our son's IEP.

If Bev Hall really wanted to know whose fingerprints were on those altered Deerwood tests, she would have found out.

Congratulations, Bev, on 9 years of progress. I hope you're around for many more. I want you to work harder on rooting out the bad people in APS. But I understand the system is weighted against you.