Letters and Comments for August 12, 2009

Deal

For the greater good?

To the Editor:

Question: Are the La Grande School Board, administrators and staff all playing on the same team? Wasn’t the team goal to support athletics and activities in

La Grande High School through pay cuts and salary and health benefit freezes?

When the plant and operations manager retired, the school board opted to not refill his position, using his wages to reduce the general fund deficit. At the Willow open house, Chris Panicke told the crowd that he was going to be the plant and operations supervisor, while Suzie Nice continues to give the work orders and job assignments.

Now they have decided to reduce an existing full-time maintenance employee’s workload by 20 hours and replace it with a 20-hour maintenance supervisory on-call position and give him a $15,000 pay raise. Who is going to perform the vacated 20 hours of regular maintenance work not to mention the 40 hours of the recently terminated groundskeeper’s work? Look what happened to Willow School without adequate maintenance — do we want to repeat that mistake?

Has the La Grande School Board and administration been non-transparent in what they are telling us and what is actually happening with the budget deficit and our tax dollars? With the budget shortfall this coming school year, that extra $15,000 would go far to support the activities program at LHS!

I spoke with the new “maintenance supervisor” a few weeks ago and he said he was not going to coach this year as he had just landed a “cushy new job” — those words verbatim. A cushy new job? Isn’t the school district operating in a mode of overall reduced expenditures for the greater good?

I wonder how the teachers feel about $15,000 of their pay cut team sacrifice being spent on a supervisory on-call “cushy” new position?

John Deal

La Grande