The term “moral hazard” has been used to describe the condition where Wall Street financiers and assorted wanna-be CEOs are rewarded for taking bigger and bigger reckless financial risks in the midst of plummeting stock values and mass layoffs of their financial ship. The government steps in and provides bailout money to prevent the “too big to fail” institution from going bankrupt, and you, the taxpayer, foots the bill.
Sound familiar? Anyone following the ongoing disintegration of the Shoreline School District would have to make the obvious connection of this turpitude in the folly of continuing to reward administrators and consultants while the classified and certificated staff are reduced and are asked to do more with less support staff. This translates into less support services, weakening standards and a move toward privatizing the district by asking the taxpayers to “pay as you go” for basic services.
Your feckless administrators, guided by a fatuous school board, sit on their ever shifting titles with one focus: Cannibalize labor costs to finance their hidden agenda — weaken standards while boosting their bottom line. Their mantra is, how low are you willing to let standards go? Accountability at the top was never an issue. Superintendent Welsh and his cronies Scudder and Fleming left the sinking Titanic with the spoils of their efforts, only to be replaced by new bean counters with the same agenda! It was like stealing candy from a baby. Imagine building a huge budget deficit by mismanaging district finances, then sending in your assistant/crony to reduce that deficit by cutting services and staff. In effect, the taxpayers and their children are paying for the cupidity of management.
It is the school board’s responsibility to ensure that mismanagement does not go on in a district. And yet, the former president of the school board, Mike Jacobs, still sits on the board. No one was held accountable! Mike looked the other way by feigning ignorance of Jim Welsh’s shell game; the agenda being to allow huge deficits to pile up in order to promote the assault on SEA, SEIU and SESPA unions.
Chuck Leone
Seattle
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