Superintendent reversal would set Escambia Schools on a collision course with failure
By Jarah Jacquay
Escambia County’s governmental gears are grinding slowly into reverse and setting our schools and students on a collision course with failure. There’s still time to pump the brakes, but the outcome of a key vote later this month will be a bellwether event. Will cooler heads prevail, or will we allow a small group of people to drag our community back into a never-ending cycle of failure?
School Board Member Kevin Adams intends to present a resolution to the school board on March 21 that, if approved, would set the stage for voters to consider returning our schools to an elected superintendent, just two years after voters abandoned that system in favor of an appointed one.
This month’s vote would not be decisive. The Escambia County Commission would still have to pass a resolution asking the legislature to place the question on the ballot during the 2024 presidential preference primary, and a majority of voters would then need to go along with it.
Still, it’s a dangerous reversal that relies on a compelling, but false narrative. Those pushing this narrative seem to wish to rewrite history and convince voters that some shadowy cabal of local elites hijacked our educational system and replaced our superintendent with a minion that would do their bidding.
This distorts what actually happened, and conceals what is truly at stake. Escambia County citizens voted to change how our superintendent was selected in the hope of reversing decades of shameful educational outcomes. The rationale for this change was strong when voters went to the ballot box two years ago, and it remains equally so today.
School board members understood this, as well, and worked strenuously to ensure the public remained engaged throughout the process of selecting the county’s first appointed superintendent — even while Covid-19 made this work very difficult. They should be applauded for those efforts. They should also be held accountable for following through with what voters started.
Here’s why: An appointed superintendent insulates the difficult work of educating our children from the vagaries of local politics, which often have less to do with the will of voters and much more to do with the whims of a few well-connected donors and patrons.
Yes, I am talking now about an actual cabal of local elites — who care less about our children’s education than they do about lining their own pockets with lucrative public contracts or imposing their values and priorities on our families.
An elected superintendent’s focus and loyalties will always be divided between parents and patrons, and the ugly truth is that our politicians often choose the patrons, because their livelihoods depend on them. That simply will not do. Campaign cycles are short, afterall, but the results of our children’s education will last a lifetime.
This is why an overwhelming majority of states, as well as most counties in Florida, had abandoned the elected superintendent model long before Escambia County voters decided to follow suit.
Of course, you might argue that whatever nefarious forces would conspire to corrupt a superintendent election would do the same with our school board races and, from there, trickle down to a superintendent, regardless of how they found their way into the job. This is a fair critique, so let me address it directly with two counter-arguments.
First, anyone wishing to corrupt an appointed superintendent would need to control five races, not one. Second, an appointed superintendent has a different set of constraints and incentives than one who is elected. Their livelihood does not depend on raising funds or campaigning to remain in office. It depends on doing their job and producing good educational outcomes.
To be clear, I am not arguing that Tim Smith is the right man to lead our district, nor am I saying that parents should be prevented from expressing their concerns about the person who manages their children’s education. I am simply affirming that voters had strong reasons to change the way our superintendent was selected two years ago and that altering course now, when the first appointee’s contract has not even come up for review, would be capricious, short-sighted and unnecessary.
Parents and voters still have ample mechanisms to express their grievances with our schools, both by electing board members who share their values and by lobbying those officials when their choice of leadership produces unfavorable outcomes.
As a parent of five school-aged children, myself, I know that behavior change demands discipline. However, without patience, structure or follow-through, this discipline is seldom effective. An appointed superintendent gives us the structure to evaluate our school’s performance and make changes over time while also allowing the administration enough room to focus on outcomes, rather than short-term political objectives.
We have the structure to succeed. What we need now is not a reversal, but the patience and resolve to follow-through on what we started.
Mel– thanks for the feedback!
I consider myself a “classical conservative” and am a registered Republican, but I am very disappointed by our legislature’s efforts to erode the principles of home rule, subsidiarity, and self-government at the local level. Folks around need to lay off the Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and read a bit more Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville to understand what true “conservatism” looks like.
It was disappointing to see Rep. Salzman call for Dr. Smith’s resignation. I have a lot of respect for her and hope against hope that her letter was the result of a good faith difference of opinion regarding job performance and tactics and not part of a coordinated state-level partisan coup to politicize and install a puppet Superintendent at the Escambia County School District.
I’m glad that Dr. Smith chose to apply for and accept this leadership position during a global pandemic and Hurricane Sally recovery efforts and that he’s refusing to back down and kow-tow to political pressure during this present crisis. I hope he’ll be able to weather this storm so that he can continue to lead the ECSD and serve the children and families of Escambia County for many years to come. He’s shown a lot of backbone and moral courage of late and has earned my respect.
Jarah, while I–wholeheartedly–agree with your above sentiments, any attempt to lay out the problems our school district faces without observing the elephant in the room is insufficient. Since no local thought “leaders” have the true guts and grit it would take to speak the obvious, I’ll go ahead and lay it down once again here:
NOTHING WILL SAVE OUR SCHOOLS AS LONG AS THE FLORIDA GOP IS HELL-BENT ON SUBJUGATING OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS–PRIMARY, SECONDARY, HIGHER EDUCATION–TO THEIR FASCIST INDOCTRINATION AND CULTURE WARS.
Don’t get me wrong; Kevin Adams is and has always been an embarrassment. The real problem is that the other 4 board members have better sense than he does, and *still* politic to hold on to their pathetic scrap of power and influence, rather than just speak the truth.
There are *very* few local republicans I speak with who don’t see the destructive reality of what’s happening here. Nobody will speak out. What, and go against DeSantis and our delegation?
Most people involved with politics here recognized a while ago that our delegation isn’t anything more than any other GOP delegation in the state of Florida: puppets, with one of our puppets having an extra set of strings for the purse. It’s now time for however many people still have eyes in their heads to recognize that *all* Florida GOP legislators, along with every member of DeSantis’s administration, are in servitude to a fascist authoritarian.
Think I’m exaggerating? Watch this session.
While I had deep respect and affection for Michelle Salzman’s reasons for running, and was willing to give her plenty of room to operate in a nearly impossible political landscape, at this point there is NO republican leadership in our area who are in a position to speak the truth about what’s really happening. What would happen if they did? They’d lose office, and none of them are willing to quit the charade of pretending that bringing back sidewalks and cottages is important enough to balance out destroying our schools, ripping away women’s reproductive rights, strangling constitutional rights, letting kids get liquidated with assault rifles, and upending democracy itself.
Therefore, anybody with a brain in their heads knows why the school board is doing this: they can’t and won’t take the heat coming from Tallahassee. Adams is a true believing cretin, to be sure. Fetsko? A craven and absolutely shameless opportunist, who downright refused to decry Nazi sympathizers during his race, and clearly orchestrates things off the dais and out of the Sunshine with Adams. (And through at least such guises as trading Trump signs out of the trunks together in the parking lot of the meetings.) Slayton? Way more ethical than Fetsko, but still no doubt under huge heat to return the power of the superintendent back to the North County. Patty Hightower? At least has enough shame left to pretend to put up a fight–being sure to build a wall of fatalistic defeat before the vote, so that she signals to other board members she’s not going to make too much of a fuss. Williams? Apparently he still thinks that Adams and Fetsko are still going to deliver on those campaign promises they made him if he continues to kowtow to their White Nationalist mob.
Anybody that thinks Warrington Middle School, specifically, wasn’t pushed into failure by the state (Diaz, Andrade) is fooling themselves. The School Board recognizes where things are at: the State will just take or overpower what they can’t get out of the Board, anyway. I often wonder if there is ever a point at which people’s pride and ethics will finally compel them to risk their piece of the political pie to simply speak the truth. So far, there is zero sign of that happening in our area, despite the fact that *plenty* of republicans see the danger of what’s going on. And as a result of this self-interested timidity, the State of Florida as a whole is descending into White Nationalism. While the destruction of our school systems only one circle of that hell, it’s real estate DeSantis and his authoritarian marshals are bent on securing. You can’t set up a dictatorship without controlling the schools and the books people have access to.
So thank you, Tim Smith, for having the courage to care for our kids to fight from the corner they have you backed into. It’s pretty much a win-win at this point, right?–hold on to your job, at least for the time being, or be terminated. So heartening to see one good man or woman willing to draw a line in the sand against the encroaching evils.
Maybe more will do so once they don’t have any real choice. Or, maybe the coup will just keep rolling on. Time will tell.