Clayton News Daily

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Since 2001 this system has been on a downward spiral due to the top level bickering and the terroistic leadership of several board members. This led to the loss of accreditation and the loss of quality staff. The current board continues to turn a blind eye to the lack of academic achievement under their favored superintendent but all of the blame is placed squarely on the shoulders of the people who repeatedly held this system together through all of its battles, the teachers. Before pointing a finger at them educate yourselves on what power and control they have over curriculum, instruction, demographics, culture and lastly the most powerful performance indicator in any system, politics then you will find who is utimately responsible. The taxpayers of this county who continually allow their board members to ignore what isn't happening in the system and allow the superintendent to garner his salary, benefits plus his entire family to do so also is once again disgraceful. I submitted a post last week requesting that perhaps the News-Daily should request records from the system on the number of teachers that have left since 2003 and compare that data to the budget cuts for those years along with the academic performance of the system. I think the taxpayers need to see the trend clearly so that they can make informed decisions during the next election. As a former educator in the system it was tough to go to places for training and state that you were from Clayton during the entire debacle from 2003 to present, at that time our peers from other systems would tell us they were praying for us and we asked them to do so continually. We cried on the day the loss of accreditation was announced and we still worked hard to hold things together for our students and to honor the trust the taxpayers had given us. Repeatedly these boards have thrust these "miracle worker" superintendents upon us who come in with agendas to make a name for themselves and support their friends and family. The successful systems in the metro area have one thing in common, they don't bring outsiders in. Clayton's board chose Edmond Heatley over Sam King, go figure that. The taxpayers are getting just desserts at this point, if you pole the teachers and staff of the schools your children attend most likely they will all have the same response, "I would rather not comment " or they simply give you a big company answer out of fear. Well the one thing they definitely need to know at this point is that quality educators continue to leave Clayton, why, well out of sheer frustration! A year or so ago Clayton had the highest number of educators with discipline issues, why who else wants to work in a system where you have people like DE that can see the forest but prefers to blame the trees. The forest is your board, get them in check and demand they hire quality leadership!