Buh bye

The morning media is making it pretty clear that Metro Nashville Public School Director Pedro Garcia is on his way out. This may be the first time I've agreed with my own school board member. She voted not to renew his contract at this time. I don't think this turn of events was a big surprise to anyone who's been watching or had a few conversations with parents of publicly school children in our town.

And like taxpayers who are demanding accountability for the dollars taken from them for public use and citizens who are demanding accountability from their legislators in regard to ethics, parents are also demanding accountability for the time their children spend in the care of the public school system.

The time of 'trust us, we're the professionals' is just gone. People are tired of excuses, run arounds, incoherent information and lack of basic respect for their being the bosses of council members, school board members and representatives of all flavors.

Telling is the amount of ink spent, again, on a sports issue. Since the days of Jamestown American's have been too distracted by entertainment and so again the news of what happened in the School Board meeting last evening which will impact 70 thousand of our children and a huge percentage of our tax dollars was cut up and pasted onto three different pages in the Tennessean. There was a couple of inches on the front page, a few more on page 8A and a few more inches, the bulk of the article, on 9A. You had to get to 9A for the money quote from Pedro Garcia:

"The cards are on the table. At this point in time, you would have to be very naïve to think that I'm going to be here in June 2007 to see what the (test) scores are." Tennessean

This reads to me like the man knows when to fold and walk. It reads to me like he doesn't have a lot of confidence in those '07 test scores.