Those following Slabbed on Twitter saw that yesterday I met with Bay Waveland School Board Trustee Mike Bell. The following Tweet of Cassandra Favre’s story in last Saturday’s Echo was the catalyst:
BW School Board creates conflict of interest in order to add new assistant superintendent to Central Office https://t.co/pOxcPuimea
— Slabbed New Media (@SlabbedNewMedia) January 28, 2017
Trustee Bell also invited both Lana Noonan of the Hancock County Alliance for Good Government and Cami Cornfoot, a former Candidate for School Board who remains very active volunteering at the schools to sit in. We had a frank and wide ranging discussion, some of which will be covered in the next post.
To his credit Bell was proactive gathering information from the central office to share with us and that information included a list of top administrator salaries and how they were funded. As Lana pointed out that information alone has news value and it will be shared with the people that read Slabbed. We’re also going to address the toxic environment created by the void left by the departure of former Superintendent Becky Ladner. Hopefully we can distill a very complex and fluid set of circumstances that became evident at the last Board of Trustees meeting.
This much is clear from those observing the School Board, which was dominated by a single forceful personality for the better part of the last 13 years. It now has five individuals that are of five different minds that are working in what is new territory for each. I used the term “fractious” to describe the Board and not in a negative connotation. It’s a good sign the system is working like it should.
Stay tuned.