Who would weed out the bad apples?

Amid the long list of proposed budget cuts, the proposal to trim the Pinellas school district's Office of Professional Standards barely registered. It involved just three jobs, for a potential saving of $275,573 toward a goal of $37-million.

But the three jobs would have come from a department that employs only four people. If district officials hadn't had a change of heart about the recommendation, the office that deals with about 2,000 allegations of employee misconduct a year would have been dismantled shortly after state lawmakers approved an Ethics in Education law that potentially could make the department even more important and busy.

Who would have been charged with the responsibility of investigating cases that deal with everything from possible child abuse to sexual misconduct? Most likely, the job would have fallen to school principals.

"Originally, the conversation was, 'Can we train principals to do more of the investigative kind of work?'" associate superintendent for human resources Ron Stone said Tuesday after a workshop where School Board members discussed the proposed cuts. "I think as we started looking at the complexity of some of these cases, we thought maybe it wasn't a good thing to put on the cut list."

So how did it get there in the first place?

Stone said he wasn't sure.

"Everyone was asked to make suggestions," he said. "All the divisions and departments were looked at from the perspective of what could you reduce and still maintain your core function."

- Donna Winchester, Pinellas education reporter

Comments

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I thought that it was only the useless politically connected administrators and "corrupt administrators" (your words just a few posts above) that are "parked" in these positions. I guess you were talking about yourself instead of your previous coworkers.

[terminator]

10:25
oh, did I forget to add, I also served on the Education Practices Commission while in Tally.
Buuuyaaa sucker!!!!!
You just got punked.
Jealousy is so unbecoming.

Dear termie,

Your experiences include failing as a teacher, a school administrator, a DOE employee and now a local union rep. Which of these qualifies you to judge anyone else?

[terminator]

from my experience as a union rep, usually the "rat squad" (OPS) is where they park the corrupt administrators.
has anyone bothered to file a public records request to look at their employment file or done a lexusnexus search to see what they can dig up?

[Ron]

I am with 4:47. You get what you pay for. We pay a ton for the admins and little for teachers. Just today the Board increased Dr. Janssen salary $50,000, from a paltry $131,000 to $184,000. Very few teachers make $50,000, but all admins do. The group in OPS is part of the waste. There are better ways to police the teachers and staff. See my first post.

If the Legislature and Senator Lisa Carlton really cared about improving the quality of teachers in Florida, public education would have seen an increase of over a billion dollars instead of a decrease of over $700 million. They didn't really care, but now, look for them to point to the dismantling of this administrative office. If the salaries were at a level that truly recruited the best and brightest (and the least pervie) into the profession, we wouldn't need much in the way of professional practice officials in the first place.

[John]

Tito--
Really???
You must have some kind of problem with the school district, but I think you're a little over the top. Get help.

[Tito]

No wonder the school system is so corrupt! How do you implement programs like TTT, essentially allowing the county to hire garbage men as teachers and not have a massive task force looking into allegations?

Meanwhile students are getting raped in Pinellas county schools on a daily basis.

[Ron]

How about the Principals designating 5 experienced teachers per school to sit on a violations/standards board that would hear the evidence presented against a teacher and decide. We use peer mediation in all the schools, why not this? Further school panels would not hear allegations from their own school, but would travel to a different school to sit and take evidence.

As it is now, it is the word of the principal and the Standards investigator against the teacher. The "accused " is not given any opportunity to gather evidence in his/her defense until the interview. It is horribly one sided and certainly diametrically opposed to the fairness issues set out in the US Constitution.