In a Cap Times story on Thursday, May 12, the superintendent seems to be trying to:
1. Control the news by telling the paper how to report on board action.
2. Tell Johnny Winston, Jr. that what Johnny thinks is irrelevant to the superintendent.
3. Put the board in its place by telling it that he will cut strings if the referendum fails, no matter what resolution the board passes.
Fortunately, Johnny seems to be speaking up.
The newspaper reports, “But Wednesday, a day after the resolution passed, Rainwater wrote an e-mail to Winston and told The Capital Times that continuing strings while still keeping the $550,000 cut assigned to it would be impossible.”
The newspaper story continues:
“But Rainwater, speaking to The Capital Times, said it was a mistake to say – as this newspaper reported Wednesday – that some form of stringed music will continue in Madison schools next year regardless of the May 24 referendums.
“There is absolutely no vote that has restored the strings program,” Rainwater said. “It doesn’t matter what Johnny thinks. It matters what the resolution says.”
Rainwater said that even if the administration had come up with some way to continue strings, that proposal would again face board approval, so nothing the board has done so far has saved the program or some variation of it.
Winston said Wednesday that he was “disappointed” by Rainwater’s e-mail.
“All I can do is make a motion and hope that the administration can carry it out,” he said. “So far, it doesn’t look like they can do that.”
“I would like to see the strings program continued somehow, some way,” Winston added. “I think the community wants that. I think that’s loud and clear.”
Yes, the superintendent’s comments could be interpreted as nothing more than a statement of the difficulty of the challenge.
But I don’t read his comments that way given the superintendent’s past attitude toward the board when the board asserts its authority. He said that Nuestro Mundo wouldn’t work, and it does. He said that it wasn’t possible to build and run a community city on school property on the West side, and the board did it. When he feels he’s losing control of the board, he will do everything possible to thwart the will of the board and the community.
Why do we even have a School Board if Sup Rainwater is going to do whatever he wants regardless of what the school board says!
Well, Rainwater is right, you have to fund strings in order to keep it. You can pass all the resolutions you want but if you don’t fund some variant of the program, it ain’t gonna happen. But, Rainwater’s also being stupid, because he’s not listening to the community, or the board that hires and fires him. He ought to be putting pencil to paper and figure out how the district can keep strings. My suggestion: consider the long-term (5-10 year) effect on the budget of dropping elementary strings. Most districts who do this math end up keeping elementary strings because a cut to elementary strings cascades into losses of economic efficiencies in middle and high school strings programs a few the road.