Editorial: Wyandanch way doesn't serve kids
Distinguished alumnus Geoffrey Canada speaks at the Wyandanch Memorial High School graduation. Credit: Photo by Steve Pfost
Wyandanch may be on the verge of rising economically, but the school district is mired in the perpetual leadership changes and controversy that have held it back for so long.
Just last week, on its way out the door, the current school board majority gave a three-year pay package to a school superintendent who, whatever his merits, could be a former superintendent very soon. That deal, combined with the likelihood of a new superintendent to follow, will cost the district too much. And instability will continue.
This latest demonstration of the Wyandanch way came just a few days before one of Wyandanch Memorial High School's most accomplished graduates, Geoffrey Canada -- a Harlem charter school executive, the education reformer central to the documentary "Waiting for Superman" and dubbed by Time Magazine one of the 100 most influential people on the planet -- returned to give the commencement speech. He is a glaring example of the district's bad personnel decisions. Fresh out of the Harvard Graduate School of Education more than three decades ago and ready to change the educational world, Canada couldn't get hired there.
Maybe he needed a friend on the school board. Over the years, boards have too often hired friends and relatives, since the district is the major source of employment in an economically distressed community. In the current case, defenders of the outgoing majority argue that they gave an extended contract to interim Superintendent Pless Dickerson to make sure he's there to protect the educational and fiscal gains they've made.
Even if you grant the current majority noble motives for giving Dickerson a three-year, $570,000 deal, even if you ignore the time he has to devote to being president of the Westbury school board, even as he works as the day-to-day head of the Wyandanch district, the board's action was questionable.
The three members of the board's minority, who'll be part of the new majority next month, voted against the package. Nobody would be surprised if the new board majority decides that Dickerson is not the man for them. But the new board, saddled with the agreement made at the last minute by the old one, would then have to negotiate a severance package for him -- and hire the new superintendent of their choice. If the incoming board runs true to the traditional ins-are-out-and-outs-are-in style, that could mean the rehiring of former superintendent Sherman Roberts.
That two-superintendent scenario would really cost a district with little money to spare. In sharp contrast to its generous award of a three-year package to Dickerson, the board laid off 15 teachers -- one of them the only art teacher in the high school.
Instead of continuing the unseemly tradition of patronage and instability, the new majority should follow Geoffrey Canada's example: Pursue excellence in education with single-minded dedication to what's best for the students. If the latest change on the board produces still more of the same squalid self-serving that the Wyandanch boards have produced far too often in the past, the victims will be the same as always: children robbed of the quality education they deserve. hN
