From the Eagle-Tribune;
Our view: Paying two for the job of one
At a time when schools everywhere complain bitterly of a lack of funds, the Timberlane Regional School District is paying two people to do the same job.
Dennis "Bucky" Tardif supposedly retired as Timberlane athletic director June 30. But he is still being paid as a consultant to his replacement, Angelo Fantasia. Tardif is earning $30 an hour for up to 20 hours a week supposedly to bring Fantasia up to speed on his difficult job. But Tardif's post-retirement employment is more likely entrenched school officials taking care of one of their own at taxpayers' expense.
No one in Timberlane leadership — not School Board Chairman William Baldwin, not Superintendent Richard La Salle — seems to know when the decision was made to hire Tardif, a 23-year school district veteran, as a consultant. There's no record of the decision in the minutes of any meeting. There's no contract, no specifics on how long he'll work — although Baldwin says the board decided he'll be needed for a year.
No records. No contract. And yet, the paychecks continue. Up to $600 a week for a year — a $30,000 kiss good-bye.
Nonsense like this quite rightly causes taxpayers to lose trust in school leaders and doubt their tales of financial hardship.
It's hard to believe Fantasia needs a year of help from Tardif. Fantasia was formerly the athletic director in Nashua, a larger district. If he was not unqualified to do the job from the outset, why was he hired?
Timberlane officials need to justify to the public their decision to employ Tardif. Without a better explanation than the one they're currently providing, Tardif should be sent back into retirement.
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11 comments:
School Board Chairman Baldwin;
Why is your board wasting $30,000 of OUR MONEY???
If the guy from Nashua is competent you dont need Bucky!
If he needs Bucky to bring him up to speed, he is too incompetent to do the job and should be fired!
Or if this is how your board does business maybe all of you should be fired, starting with you, the Chairman!
Don't you know about the jockstrap club at Timberlane? If you want to get into upper management, your best bet is to be a coach; even better, be a wrestling coach!
Don't believe me? Where do you think the principal and head of guidance come from? Woody's a nice enough guy, but don't you think it's weird that 2 of the top administrators happen to have been wrestling coaches?
Hey, academics aren't that important really, right?
People need to wake up and start voting no for school warrant articles. The "its for the children" mentality has gone too far and the district is just throwing money away. How many millions were spent on H.S renovations just a few years ago, and they already are talking about another renovation or possibly building a new school. The last renovation was an absolute farse and they were using modular classrooms again just two years after the renovations were completed. How intelligent is that? And these people are educating our children. Start voting NO on this wasteful spending. I hope that I never see the day that the voters cave in and vote for a new high school.
To me, this sounds like the kind of sweetheart deal that would be worked out in a nonpublic session of the school board...then sealed for 99 years.
I've heard, too, that the school board has authorized the SAU to offer tuition discounts to employees. Wouldn't a responsible school board use this as a bargaining chip in the upcoming contract negotiations? As in, "We'll discount your kids' tuition if you teach our kids. Deal?"
The Superintendent of the SAU has publicly announced that the SAU has no contingency plans in case of a teacher strike.
It's apparent that the management team (aka the SAU) and the board of directors (aka the school board) are in breach of fiduciary duty to the stockholders (aka the taxpayers).
We need to elect school board members who will respect the interests of the taxpayers when selecting a superintendent. We should begin to replace the school board so that La Salle is not offered a new contract once the current contract expires.
In the mean time, yes, vote against all warrants -- especially one funding the upcoming contract.
The district has a $59,464,070.00 budget for 4,653 kids in the district!
DO THE MATH!!!
That is $12,780/ kid!!! And with all that money their test scores keep falling, the academic performance is abyssmal, only 53% of high schoolers can pass the math basic skills test,
BUT...
Our Athletics are GREAT!!
And we have a AWESOME SpEd. Dept.!
18.9% of the district is CODED!!!
WHAT a claim to fame.
In the last 20 years Timberlane has slid from one of the best schools in the state to one of the worst performing high schools in the state, and this is in the more affluent southern tier of the state.
And noone appears to care.
But Macciard,
Redoing the HS school scheduling will fix all that!!! Just ask Coker, LaSalle and the rest. And of course, our SB members are along for the ride.
Funny how the best HS in the state, Londonderry, has excellent academics, sports and music programs and manages to "limp along" on the same scheduling system (7 classes per day) as Timberlane. But our SAU people insist on changing something that is clearly not broken instead of addressing real problems. I guess that's often easier.
When you don't know how to lead,
And there is no one to follow,
And you refuse to get out of the way,
Try the FAD, at least you will appear to be doing SOMETHING!
Once again, the SAU folks and school board members have shown us that they will do whatever they want to do. They continue to sell us a bill of goods that aren't true (ie: building costs for one) If mr. LaSalle is keeping Bucky on the payroll to help get a new High or Middle school he is sadly mistaken. we have had enough of the "snow jobs" and will never vote for it. everyone blames the teachers for everything that goes wrong. when in fact it is the administration in this district that is to blame for all the wrong doings. It is time to put academics first.
At a SB meeting Cocker said that BS has been around for a while, many schools in the area are now switching back to a traditional schedule. Makes me wonder why TRHS did not attempt to implement this much sooner, why wasn't it good enough back when everyone else was implementing it?
Ever wonder why all of the Timberlane website have all this fluff about meetings, events, athletics, mission statements, plans, high sounding ideas,
but NOTHING about academics!
No academic results!
No Test scores!
No Sample questions or answers!
No information of how Timberlane compares to other schools within the state academically!
If you want a laugh, or a cry, go to;
http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/itemmaps/
There are sample test questions for each subject; look at some of the answers, not only do the answers display a woeful lack of education, but they are chronically misspelled, exhibit poor grammar, no sentence structure, and these are graduating SENIORS!
The same applies to the school board. go back and watch the meetings on http://danvilledelivery.com/danvilledelivery.shtml -- they talk about parking, health care, global warming, construction, retirement, funding -- anything but performance.
If I were in charge of a poorly performing school district, I'd reserve the meetings for analysis and improvement.
Then again, making things better would be a priority for me, so...
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