THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 10, 1995 TAG: 9509090119
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Letters
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines
Strapped school system
making new, pricy hires?
If the Virginia Beach School System is $7.4 million in deficit for the 1994-95 school year, then it appears that it is getting a good start at putting itself in the same predicament this year.
I cannot imagine that they are going to hire an International Baccalaureate (IB) coordinator at Princess Anne High School ($55,000) and a Magnet School for the Mathematics and Science Coordinator at Ocean Lakes High School (also administrative salary). It is ludicrous to think that an assistant principal cannot be assigned those duties.
Barbara Elliott
Paiute Road
Not just financially
but academically aground
Can you imagine the Navy promoting a captain who ran his ship aground? Yet Dr. Sidney L. Faucette now has an even cushier job in Georgia. He was so busy ``fixing'' the public school system there he took days to return phone calls - calls coming from Virginia Beach, anyway.
And to think that just a few weeks ago, the Virginia Beach Education Association (the glorious teachers union that gave us Dr. Charles Vincent), the School Board and certain City Council members were sounding his praises! Their words of praise for Faucette (enough to gag a maggot) were printed in The Atlanta Constitution. That's probably why the Gwinnett County School Board hired him.
What a sight to see the very people who hired Dr. Faucette, oversaw his administration and controlled the purse strings now trying to do damage-control! What embarrassment! What surprise! What indignation! What outrage! Since every sitting School Board member was appointed by City Council or endorsed by the VBEA, they should be embarrassed. Even those still ignorant of the pernicious social engineering going on in our schools can recognize financial mismanagement when they see it. Seven-million-dollar deficits cannot be hidden in-def-i-nite-ly.
More serious than the financial mismanagement of our schools is the manner in which they've been turned from academic pursuits into social-service agencies. And how about Stanford University's controversial ``Accelerated Schools'' program that was brought to Virginia Beach by Dr. Faucette while the School Board slept?
For those unfamiliar with Orwellian ``Newspeak,'' accelerated-schools are ``dumbed-down'' schools in which those students ready and eager to learn are held back to coach the slower students. The latest test scores for Virginia Beach reveal just how ``accelerated'' they are. When certain key people in Georgia (who did their homework) asked Dr. Faucette recently about accelerated schools, he disowned them. Interesting!
Also, while Rome burns, our City Council will probably keep hiring Total Quality Management ``facilitators'' to help members get in touch with their feelings, and the School Board will keep hiring outside consulting firms to pick school division superintendents.
As for the VBEA, it will continue to plead poverty (Don't you know? Teachers have to buy chalk and erasers out of their own pockets) while spending thousands of dollars on TV commercials to tell us what a good job they're doing.
And what will parents and taxpayers do? They will probably keep on doing what they've been doing all along: They will bail out the system financially and blame themselves when their children graduate from high school with little more than a package of condoms, politically-correct attitudes, and self-esteem. That is, unless we begin removing from office those who ran the ship aground.
Joseph L. Gwynn, President
Citizens for Better Education by CNB