UPDATED: Superintendent Jim Notter to Step Down
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| Broward County School Board |
| Jim Notter is finally hitting the road. |
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| WSVN |
UPDATED: Embattled Broward Schools Supt. Jim Notter announced today at the end of the board meeting that he is retiring from his post at the end of the school year. It's the first step in bringing real credibility back to the board (despite its blue-ribbon panels and other nonsense) after the grand jury report slammed him and the School Board for their inept and corrupt ways. The writing was on the wall for Notter as new School Board members, led by Patti Good, were taking steps to do a special evaluation that could have led to his forced ouster.
Below is the blog post I wrote this afternoon before the announcement that has a rather appropriate ending.
-- At yesterday's Broward School Board workshop on the budget, felon-appointer and racial slur-spitter Ann Murray said in her thick Boston accent that she had identified the "caan-suh" that was causing all the corruption at the district.
It's not the School Board members like her, she opined, but district workers on staff.
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| Murray |
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| Gottlieb |
That's right, they want to privatize the facilities department with contractors. These two discredited elected officials want to bring in private contractors -- and possible campaign contributors -- to come in and make more public profits by actually now running the schools and overseeing construction.
Let the fox take over schoolhouse, so to say.
Mind you, the Statewide Grand Jury report largely pinpointed School Board members, Gottlieb prominent among them, as the root cause for the mismanagement and hundreds of millions in wasted taxpayers' dollars over the past five years. Unfortunately Murray, by her own admission, didn't actually read the full report, so maybe she still doesn't understand that.
But Murray's irrational conclusion is that because the School Board members haven't been there, it can't possibly be the School Board members themselves who are the problem because they haven't been there for decades.
So it's got to to be the staff, she says, perhaps forgetting that she spent her career as one of the staffers in the School Board transportation department.
Buried in a Sentinel article on the workshop meeting yesterday is this quote from Murray: "It's quite clear that this
[facilities] department has continued to be a distraction."
A distraction from what? From the slow-motion rape of taxpayers by special interests who make puppets out of the School Board members?
In this same staff are the whistleblowers who testified before the grand jury and have been crying foul about the political machine that pressures them to build unnecessary schools with their favorite contractors (and campaign contributors) that have wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayers' dollars and left the board $2 billion in debt.
Of course, the real constant through all those years has been the lobbyists and contractors who make puppets of the School Board members with their massive campaign contributions, hoity-toity head-spinning award dinners, jobs for family members, etc. The construction heads change as the need for scapegoats arises.
This fish is rotten from its head (the lousy politicians), not its tail (the School Board workers charged with carrying out a criminal and dysfunctional board's corrupt and inept mandates).
The cancer, in short, is the likes of Murray and Gottlieb -- and because they have been stung by an independent grand jury, they want to eradicate those who had the gall to call them out on their horrendous policies.
And these two holdovers from the worst school board in Florida history -- show me a worse one and I'll qualify that later -- want to bring those special interests into the board to run the facilities and construction departments.
Call it the next big scam -- after all, the special interests can't pay themselves, can they?
It is the most audacious and arrogant proposal we've seen yet from the derelict board. So what does Supt. Jim Notter -- who is incredibly still sitting in his seat of power after being slammed by the grand jury -- say?
He says it "makes sense that we seek significant change in how we're organized," according to the Sentinel report.
Well, there's one staff member who needs to go -- along with at least two more School Board members.
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