It is sad and also very telling to read former Blaine County School Board Chair Lynn Flickinger’s bullying attacks on the two current school board trustees who are bucking the entrenched system by having the nerve to question current BCSD spending practices and ask for a board treasurer to help them in their fiduciary duties.
When the treasurer position was asked for, the entire administrative team showed up at the usually sparsely attended Financial Committee meeting (show of power/intimidation). An important, well-researched letter to that committee was intentionally withheld by the superintendent, leaving them incompletely informed for their important vote. The board knows of this because they were provided the letter with a complaint about the occurrence. I would think that if a school superintendent intentionally withheld important information from the board or one of its committees, she would be, at the very least, seriously disciplined.
During this show of intimidation, Trustee Liz Corker was falsely painted to be ‘anti-teacher,’ another bullying tactic. Mike Chatterton was painted to be the victim of slander (turning the issue from financial management to personal attack) just because there was a proposal to provide the checks and balances of having both a Business Manager and a Treasurer to improve Blaine County’s School Board’s stewardship of public tax dollars.
In truth, the real victims here are we trusting public taxpayers, who have assumed over the years that the school district was being run responsibly—that the board was heading the district properly, not the administration leading the board.
In actuality, it was during Lynn Flickinger’s tenure as board chair that the inexplicable increase began in BCSD administrative positions specifically, and school spending in general. During her oversight as chairperson, the number of BCSD administrators rose from four (Superintendent, Board Clerk, Treasurer, Director of Special Services) to six, the new positions being Assistant Superintendent and Director of Special Education. That’s a 50 percent increase in administrative positions while enrollment increased 18 percent.
Unfortunately, this former trustee’s documented lack of prudent oversight was just the beginning of bringing us to the bloated BCSD administration we have today. While student enrollment increased just 23 percent between 1996 and now, the number of administrative positions has increased 120 percent with the addition of six new BCSD administrative positions: Director of Human Resources and Director of Special Services in 1999; Public Relations in 2002 (became the more highly paid Director of Communications in 2010); Director of Technology in 2002; Director of Curriculum in 2007; Testing and Data Coordinator in 2014.
I challenge this former board chair or any other former board trustee to show the public a single instance in which any board member ever questioned the necessity of adding these administrative positions. Additionally, did they ever, on any occasion, question the routinely presented monthly financial consent agenda? Did they ever question the overly large annual salary increases of the administrators? Proof should be found in the minutes of board meetings. In all my review of past board meeting minutes I have never found such evidence, and I have never seen such questioning occur until Liz Corker and Cami Bustos came on board. They deserve great credit, not the bullying of complicit former board members.
I believe that what’s appalling is this historical, consistent lack of school board oversight over district spending, not the admirable efforts of two of our trustees to begin to remedy the situation.
As we move through this difficult transformation at the BCSD, from a superintendent-guided board back to a citizen-guided board, we will do well to remember to keep all our efforts issue-based and not turn these very real and serious issues into bullying attacks on current board members.
Pamela Plowman
Hailey resident