Beating a Dead Horse

One thing that was done that should have been a signal to all of us was the fiasco on the first day of school last year. The traffic jams, the confusion, the utter chaos was something that foreshadowed the whole year.

Now, there are people who want to drop the issue. She apologized, after all, and took responsibility for it. This is true, but only because she literally had no one else to blame regarding this. This isn’t the real issue, though. The real problem was that it indicated a failure on several levels even before the first car pulled into the parking lot, and clearly foreshadowed many of the problems that would plague her through the year.

First, she ignored anyone who tried to tell her it would not work. She was convinced we had a problem, and that she had to come in on her silver charger to solve it. She was told by many of the staff of issues that might arise, but she refused to listen to them.

Second, the plan was screwed up. The communication went out to the parents, but it was incomplete and incomprehensible. Key information was missing that would have been the only way to keep what would have been a bad situation from degenerating into the cluster that it did.

Third…it was an exact copy of her plan from her previous school, even down to the map. The problem was that it showed a basic lack of traffic flow and the differences between the two areas. Philadelphia Pike is a bit different then State Street, and there are a “few” more students here than at Holy Rosary. This also foreshadowed changes that have often turned out to be simply an erasure of one school’s letterhead for another. Not reinventing the wheel is a good thing, but when you come from a failing school, you probably should rethink a mass importation of their policies.

Finally…she did try to justify her decisions, and tried to get her hastily formed committee (after she messed up) to back a second try. When they would not go along with this, she abruptly stopped having them.