Dear editor and to whom it may concern:
Dr. Nancy Anderson said "teacher salaries account for 90 percent of the district's expenses." The district was removed from fiscal distress 18 months later after Anderson's first year as superintendent.
"That is why, when you are in fiscal distress, the quickest way to get out is to cut those salaries," Anderson said.
Nothing, nothing, is more important to a school than its teachers. So to come in and reduce expenses by reducing teachers pay is the very worst action a school board can take. When teachers at CMS are already underpaid and the new superintendent comes in and cuts teachers' salaries to balance the budget, that is a recipe for disaster.
And for her with the school board's approval to increase her own salary, already much above the teacher's salaries, is not only insensitive, but a foolish waste of scarce resources. The superintendent "picked the low fruit" when she cut teacher's salaries. She should have done that last, not first. Anderson just doesn't understand how to run an organization that is so dependent on personnel/teachers. Then, you wonder why we have declining test scores and such a high teacher turnover rate. Our school needs consistency.
Cutting salaries may reduce overall expenses for a year, but going into the second year and so on, they will have teacher resignations and retirements coming out of their ears. As seen over the last several years. She took a long-term problem and tried to solve it with a short-term solution. That never works. Long-term problems require long-term solutions.
This is almost as bad as saying that we have limited blood and since the heart is the biggest user of blood, let's cut out the heart. No! The patient dies when you do that. So the same is with the school. Cut the number of teachers, qualifications of the teachers and the pay of the teachers, and the school dies. Yet, that's what Superintendent Nancy Anderson has done and the board members went along with that approach.
Jen Kendrick and family
Hot Springs
Editorial on 11/28/2017