The Great Exodus of 2015 represents quite a learning curve for loyal Gilbert Public Schools employees. Last year, the huge number of resignations and retirements was made out to be the fault of conservative board members. According to local media pundits in 2014:
The perception is out there that teachers and administrators are under attack, and that they better get out now while they can find jobs elsewhere. Staying loyal to Gilbert — even if it is one of the state’s top-ranked school districts — simply isn’t worth the risk. We’re losing hundreds of years of collective experience, all in one fell swoop. And once that kind of knowledge is gone, it’s going to be hard as heck to get it back.
Blame was laid on thick by a group of self-promoting nay-sayers and Gilbert Education Association back in 2014. They loudly proclaimed: “The only staff left are the bitter dregs of a once-excelling school district! All the amazing teachers are gone! Conservatives ruined this district!” The only problem for them was that those occupants of the GPS Clown Car got it wrong.
This year, there’s a huge uptick in GPS employee losses, which has to be embarrassing for Superintendent Kishimoto, who famously claimed she was hired to stop “the mass exodus of employees” that occurred during the 2013-2014 school year. This year, GPS employees have finally accepted that loyalty, the hallmark of long-term GPS employees, has been a one-way street for years and won’t change with the new administration or the new bought-and-paid for board members.
Today’s headline: Teachers threaten protest at Gilbert school meeting. (We covered that subject already, here and here.)
Turmoil has enveloped GPS for more than a year as employees battle with the school board and now some say the board has gone too far with controversial contract wording. Many plan to protest a recent GPS board decision that some are calling an “imprisonment clause.” The clause would include monetary fines for employees who leave their contracts early.
Let’s look at the numbers, as of the end of May each year:
At the last board meeting at the end of April 2015, Board President Lily Tram and Superintendent Christina Kishimoto shut down discussions that two board members tried to bring out in public. How? By saying that board members Daryl Colvin and Julie Smith could discuss their concerns about employee contracts during the next policy committee meeting. Guess what happened.
Okay, time’s up. What happened in the illegal Policy Committee meeting* was that there was not a hint of a discussion about GPS employee contracts. Nope, that’s when Superintendent Christina Kishimoto unloaded her super secret plan to require GPS students to take a year of foreign language credits or no graduation for them! What else happened: Superintendent Christina Kishimoto, the highest paid superintendent in the State of Arizona, and her highly paid staff members and the entire school board enjoyed ANOTHER catered lunch at taxpayer expense. It’s like these folks can’t pay for their own meals, but the struggling families in the Gilbert Public Schools district boundaries can cough up more, more and more dollars to feed pigs at the trough.
Christina Kishimoto’s recommendations for her *reforms* have been all over the map. Suddenly the focus is on new graduation requirements for students, adding a year of foreign language study for all students. Who knew Gilbert Public Schools needed these reforms? Certainly not the community. Certainly not the taxpayers. It was only Superintendent Christina Kishimoto and her lackeys that believed GPS needed to invest MILLIONS OF DOLLARS in Google Chrome books. They said it was necessary so students could take standardized tests online. <face palm>
Also on Christina Kishimoto’s recommendation, the GPS Governing Board approved a teeny-tiny across-the-board pay raise for all employees, including those carpetbaggers who receive six-figure salaries. Then Good Old Jeff Gadd *discovered* an extra $3.1 MILLION, but he’s saving it to keep taxes down while GPS tries to sell an override and bond to taxpayers. Some employees are more equal than others, as it turns out.
The newest pigs at the trough, those who are getting raises as high as 25% ON TOP OF THE ACROSS-THE-BOARD raises for all employees, mostly are support staffers who work at the White Castle, the GPS district offices. Plus Crystal Korpan, the gal whose short career was a rocket ride through GPS, got paid $720.00 as a consultant after she resigned to go to work in the Queen Creek School District. Crystal Korpan’s departure apparently was not subject to the Imprisonment Clause that now applies to GPS employees who try to leave. Life is sweet for a select few, as it always has been in Gilbert Public Schools. In our next post, we’ll take a look at who in Gilbert Public Schools is profiting at the expense of taxpayers while Superintendent Christina Kishimoto laughs in the faces of teachers whose pay has been frozen for years. Same old stuff.
******************
* Big Fat Asterisk: GPS, under Superintendent Christina Kishimoto’s *leadership* has been circumventing the law by holding Policy Committee meetings, which have been self-described as a *committee of the whole,* meaning all board members attend the meetings. Last month, the Superintendent and the Board President blatantly told two board members to shut up and sit down, they would get their chance to discuss during the next policy committee meeting. The Powers That Be didn’t want the public to know what they were doing in secret, but they stupidly started referring to conversations and board discussions that occurred during those meetings. Even better, THEY DID SO WHILE THEY WERE SITTING ON THE DAIS DURING REGULAR MEETINGS. We just love it when a cover-up unravels so publicly!
State law requires that meetings of the Governing Board be noticed to the public at least 24 hours in advance. The same time requirement exists for posting the agenda of meetings. Ergo, the May meeting of the Policy Committee was illegal because the requirements were not met. There still isn’t an agenda online for the May meeting. There are no minutes, either, even though State law requires those minutes to be available for public inspection within three days. Yeppers, this is another GPS Clown Car driving over a cliff.
Funny thing, GPS set themselves up for failure by the way they tried to back-date their online agenda for the March 2015 meeting; document properties show the March agenda was created on April 21, 2015! It’s always the cover-up, as Richard Nixon discovered.