EDITOR: Before I escape to Hawaii for two weeks where I can bury
my head in white sand and temporarily forget all the nonsense
happening back here, I thought I
’d reflect on the good, the bad, and the ugly in Morgan Hill
these days …
EDITOR:
Before I escape to Hawaii for two weeks where I can bury my head in white sand and temporarily forget all the nonsense happening back here, I thought I’d reflect on the good, the bad, and the ugly in Morgan Hill these days …
The good, and I mean very good, is the continual efforts of hundreds of volunteers who make all the fun happenings in Morgan Hill possible. Mushroom Mardi Gras is always wonderful, the Friday night dances downtown can’t be beat, this year’s 4th of July festivities were better than ever and I’m looking forward to Taste Of Morgan Hill, as usual. I often invite out-of-town guests to join us in the fun, and they are always so impressed by the organization, the enthusiasm, and the small-town feeling of all the activities they attend.
I’m proud to call Morgan Hill my home, but lately, I’ve had to hide the newspaper headlines from any guests I have. No one would believe them anyway – such a soap opera in a town this size and in this day and age. At least the controversies are making citizens write their opinions to the newspaper and show up at City Council meetings (which have become as amusing as school board meetings) – involvement is a good thing. Of course, the council’s involvement in personal matters, to the tune of nearly $100K of taxpayer’s money (a slap in the face to all those volunteers who work so hard), is a bad thing. That kind of money could have kept the 50-meter pool open for four months this winter.
And the ugly? That prize goes to the school district. Administrators are fleeing as fast as they can find new jobs (losing Nancy Serigstad at Live Oak High was particularly devastating), and the ones who can’t get hired elsewhere are staying (which is a frightening thought). The district is opening a new school in three weeks and still doesn’t have a working budget for it, students’ choices of schools to attend are being compromised (if they were to deny all the transfer students from other districts, there would be plenty of room for MHSD students to attend Live Oak), and only several people have stepped up to the plate to run for the four vacant positions on the school board.
The good is a person like Bob Griesinger who not only spends countless hours of his time coaching the Live Oak football team on a volunteer basis, but he is also taking his run for school board extremely seriously, having already attended independent school board workshops, MHSD school board meetings, and Coyote Valley Specific Plan meetings, to say nothing of dishing out the $1,800 necessary to run. At least his campaign won’t cost much, if there are only a few running.
How different from just two years ago when 10 people ran for four spots. Of course, that was before one of the elected trustees resigned in disgrace, the other three veteran members are finally being held accountable for all the mistakes they made (negligence is the key word) that cost the district tens of millions of dollars (and made it impossible to finish Live Oak as promised), and the one board member who always does her homework and asks questions that no one wants to and usually doesn’t answer, is lambasted over an innocent comment that was taken wrong.
Of course, if you’re George Panos, you can get away with publicly and erroneously attacking an innocent person from his position as school board president and also make it impossible to communicate with him even though he claims he wants to listen (don’t worry if you can’t reach him, because he doesn’t listen anyway).
So when school opens in three weeks, all the good teachers will try to hold it together for the students while adjusting to new principals, lacking resources that used to be taken for granted, and settling for salaries that pale in comparison to that of our fearless leader who was generously rewarded for ineptness. That’s the good, the bad, and the ugly in a nutshell (pun intended).
Brooke Bailey, Morgan Hill
