One of our sources reported to us that one of the Farragut lower schools had 236 children out today. The heat was rare in some classrooms and the gym. Several classrooms had no heat. School staff called early this morning to report the heat issues. When the staff tried to call again downtown was not answering the phones.
At Farragut High School the early block class had 3 students, the first block had 2 students, the second block class had 8 students and the third block class had 6 students. The faculty were complaining that this could have been one of the days they don’t get paid for. The list of absences for Farragut High School is rumored to be 20 pages long.
McIntyre has done really well to have his first blunder after 7 months on the job. But this one has cost him some serious credibility.
School is either open or it is closed. It’s open unless you are too cold to be there is not an executive decision. After Thursday night’s presentation when Dr. McIntyre explained that his encouragement of parent participation in our system will be to “teach parents how to continue school at their kitchen table,” and this inability to make a clear call on inclement weather, I am not pleased.
Can we hope he’s so disappointed with us he’ll give us our money back? Nah. How pathetic. Not tough enough to make a decision one way or the other, and when he puts the responsibility on other people, if they don’t decide the way he “hopes” they will, he whines about it.
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2009/jan/16/knox-superintendent-disappointed-low-attendance-to/
After that quote all I can say is he must not care about what the people who are paying him think.
He must have a huge early release clause in that contract. Since he’s getting a quarter of a mil to begin with, we’ll probably have to give him half a mil just to go away.
This is what we’re paying a quarter of a million for?
I was even more infuriated after watching Dr. McIntyre on WVLT. He said that he expected teachers to use today to teach on an “individual” basis. Yeah right, while those students friends have an excused “lay out” day. If you watch the interview, McIntyre seems ticked that someone is actually questioning him. He also seems to have no understanding of the “customers” of the schools, which is probably because he has spent MAYBE a year in a classroom.
I heard this week that a group of five school administrators on a committee flew out to Colorado this week to visit TWO schools, one affluent, one not so, so they could learn, who knows what? Is this the time to be sending administrators on junkets?
Although we’re only halfway through the year, and some would argue McIntyre hasn’t had enough time, I would argue that for the money he’s making (and apparently he’s still negotiating how much he’ll make) and the dangerous economic situation we’re facing, he’s had more than enough time. The longer he stays, the more damage he’ll do.