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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Eyes on the prize, people! The per-seat cost of HBW/Shriver was exactly the same as the per-seat cost of the Hamm expansion. Totally agree, recent building expenses were absurd, but what's done is done. Let's focus on how to get class sizes smaller and how to actually pay great staff competitively with Fairfax. Debating slides and "the Heights" and the Outdoor Lab won't get us there. It will require sustained pressure to the County Board to prioritize schools over their myriad vanity projects, pressure on state elected officials to fix the ridiculous underfunding of Arlington schools relative to our neighboring districts, and pressure on the School Board to cut more Syphax bloat.[/quote]

Ok, I'll bite, please identify which exact positions you would cut in Syphax. I'll wait. [/quote]

You say this like it's hard. Let's start with the cabinet: Mann is good. Graves is good. I have no opinion of Crawford. Mayo and Stockton can both go because both were at least adjacent to scandals in Maryland districts and they both do jobs that SHOULD be done by a superintendent who wants to be more than a figurehead who hands out balloons.

Stockton was Chief of Staff in MCPS and therefore likely complicit when their recently fired Sueprintendant allowed a known sexual harrasser to be promoted multiple times. Mayo was the head of HR in Baltimore County when he did not disclose income from SUPES Academy, a company that helped school districts train administrators. The superintendent at the time, Dallas Dance, was sentenced to six months in prison for falsifying financial disclosure statements submitted to the school system. Mayo's incorrect financial disclosure statements were later destroyed. Instead of facing his own investigation, Mayo came here to APS. 
https://davidplymyer.com/2018/09/04/baltimore-county-schools-record-purge-more-significant-than-public-realizes/
You may recall that our last permanent superintendent, Patrick Murphy, was also disgraced and fired in MCPS for his involvement in the MCPS scandal.

I think the finance office has grown ridiculously in recent years, so I would cut Mark McLaughlin. Cut the Director of Labor Relations, Stephanie Maltz, which is a position that no other local school district doing collective bargaining has. We have both an executive director of curriculum and instruction and a Director of Curriculum and Instruction. That's the same position, cut one of them, I don't care which. I'd definitely cut from some of the publicity and "community relations" team.

I would gladly go on.
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Stockton was with MCPS for a blink of an eye. Not sure I find that persuasive that he knew everything that had gone on and was going on there.
Murphy? Don't know how long he was there. I think it's odd that you paint these people as totally corrupt by only citing things that happened when they were at MCPS, which is for both of them only a blip in their entire careers.  Mayo another story, clearly.

While I believe many positions could be eliminated at Syphax, I think you should be eliminating positions because they're unnecessary and not because of who currently holds them. Move the competent people into the positions that should be retained; don't keep a position because a competent person is in it. The problem answering the PP's question is that it is unclear to most ordinary citizens what all the positions supposedly do in order to be able to answer which ones should go. But the added layers Duran has put in is likely a good start.

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Murphy was one of the few people fired for that MCPS scandal, so it’s definitely fair to paint him as corrupt. Apparently someone had attempted a coverup/ destroyed relevant files, and it seems it was likely him.

Stockton was the Chief of Staff for goodness sake. No one said he was corrupt, just that he was in the circle of people who were. He didn’t blow the whistle to WaPo, that fell to those who were harassed. [b]When he left MCPS, their press release said it was because he had been in a long distance relationship. That struck me as odd because moving to Arlington doesn’t change that.[/b]

Plus, those are positions that are new within the last five years. Duran should be able to run the school system, it’s not nearly as big as FCPS or MCPS. It’s redundancy at the top, which is why I’d start there. There are many examples of bloat at the lower levels of Syphax too, and I agree with other particular examples cited above.[/quote]

Stockton apparently married another superintendent in IL. (Don't ask me why I know this. I must have read it in an article in an MCPS forum.) My guess is that he's only filling in for the school year as a favor to Duran before he leaves too. [/quote]

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