Hiring of Tom Parent as Senior Operations Officer Indicative of Poor Judgment on the Part of Sub-Mediocre New Minneapolis Public Schools Superintendent Lisa Sayles-Adams
Sub-Mediocre Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS)
Superintendent Lisa Sayles-Adams has exercised another of many instances of
poor judgment in hiring Tom Parent, the head of operations at the St. Paul
Public Schools, as Senior Operations Officer.
This is a person for whose misdeeds the St. Paul Public Schools had to
pay $16,000 to settle a harassment suit after several female staff members
complained about Parent’s misogynistic treatment of them.
Sayles-Adams’s decision to hire Parent was made,
despite misgivings of MPS Senior Human Resources Office Alicia Miller and
current Senior Officer for Finance and Operations, Ibrahima Diop. Diop is one of the three best senior public
schools finance officers in the United States;
when MPS Interim Superintendent Rochelle Cox added operations to his
responsibilities when she ked the district from July 2022 through December
2023, Diop managed the division adeptly.
Thus, Sayles-Adams has with one considerably
maladroit move hired a person of questionable morals, increased the
bureaucratic burden of the district by adding an unnecessary position, and
dismayed Miller and Diop, two of the most talented members on staff at the
Davis Center (MPS central offices).
This is only one of several highly questionable
decisions made by the lackluster and mean-spirited Sayles-Adams since she began
her unfortunate tenure at the Minneapolis Public Schools(MPS) on February 5,
2024, following a 1 December 2023 MPS Board of Education vote to hire
Sayles-Adams. That vote came after a
corruptly conducted superintendent search in which then Board Chair Sharon
El-Amin maneuvered to create a Superintendent Task Force dominated by cronies
of both her and Sayles-Adams.
The corruption and ineptitude of the current
iteration of the MPS Board of Education in conducting the most recent
superintendent search are magnified when one considers that Board members bore
witness to the most effective leadership that MPS has ever had during the time
span (July 2022 through December 2023) in which Interim Superintendent Rochelle
Cox led the district. Cox nurtured the
talent of Senior Academic Office Aimee Fearing;
together, Cox and Fearing oversaw the implementation of promising programs
pertinent to Intervention Triads, online high-dosage tutoring, online ACT
tutoring, as well as nascent efforts to implement in-house teacher training and
to advance knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum sequenced grade by
grade over the preK-12 years.
But rather than selecting Rochelle Cox as the
long-term superintendent, MPS Board of Education members variously led or
relented to the corrupt selection process that resulted in the selection of a
sub-mediocre, mean-spirited superintendent in Lisa Sayles-Adams, who has ousted
her rival Cox and also dismissed Fearing---
both of whom quickly moved to the Fridley Public School District.
In this edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution,
I evaluate the quality of MPS cabinet members that still were listed officially
on the MPS website as of June 2024, with an ultimate focus on three associate
superintendents who are likely to remain.
The three of mention are Shawn Harris-Berry, Yusuf Abdullah, and Laura
Cavender, who are typical, sycophantic education establishment mediocrities
whom Sayles-Adams has determined she can dominate.
Conditions at the Minneapolis Public Schools(MPS)
have reached a nadir for the period of June 1914 through June 2024 of my
intensive investigation into the inner workings of this school district; reasons for the district reaching this point
are powerfully represented by these abominable staffing decisions by the
truculent Lisa Sayles-Adams.
No comments:
Post a Comment