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Backbone Anyone?

It has become too predictable. School boards and school administrators
hide the sometimes scandalous behavior of some of their personnel,
administrators and teachers behind the bogeyman of confidentiality
and/or the cowards’ way out of payoffs to avoid public lawsuits.
So we have one, for sure, and possibly two principals railroaded out
in Caledonia North with a superintendent and board hiding behind a payoff
to keep the personnel quiet. Then, we have another in Concord with
district officials saying nothing, when all of them knew everything about
the mysterious disappearance of Karl Stein. And we have former St.
Johnsbury School superintendent, Lou Lafasciano, who left St. Johnsbury
only to be placed on administrative leave last month in his new,
now foreshortened job in New Hampshire, both with no satisfactory explanation.
Then, there was the game musical predator-chairs played out among
three districts, Morristown, Colchester, and Swanton, although every
school official in Morristown knew what was going on and “passed on
the garbage” to the other two by giving a sexual molester a letter of recommendation.
Now, we hear of a former Pittsburg, N.H. teacher accused of sexually
assaulting a teenage student.
There is no genteel way to put it. A worrisome number of school administrators
and boards are hiding behind the legally ambiguous cloak
of secrecy. Their back-bonelessness applies equally to the revolving door
phenomenon of administrators within our area schools. The shamelessness
goes beyond cowardice and bad management. It borders on the
criminal. To cover their own fannies, they may be putting our kids at serious
risk.
Our school boards and administrators seem to have learned nothing
from the festering ulcer of child abuse that blossomed in the Catholic
Church by its refusal for decades to acknowledge the problem and get
rid of the sexual predators posing as men of God. If school boards and
administrators do not get honest about these things, they could be facing
a similarly expensive and dangerous fate.