Part four
Re “Gourley Discusses the ‘Crazy Myrna Coté Contract”
Perhaps the most compelling reason the School Board offered a one-year contract to new Supt. Patti Jaffe rather than the more conventional two or three was to give the new face(s) on the incoming School Board next December a wider voice in the future of the School District.
One-term Board member Steve Gourley, who announced last month he would not run again, said the present Board was needlessly handcuffed by what he called a “crazy” self-perpetuating contract he believed was authored by the previous Superintendent, Dr. Myrna Rivera Coté, that gave her, he said, far too much control.
“The way Myrna’s contract was written,” Mr. Gourley said, “Scott and I had no real choice (or influence). Karlo and Pat and Kathy didn’t, either.
“When I was preparing for last June’s evaluation of Myrna, and taking opinions from other Board members, I did not know how it was going to come out.
“I knew what I was going to write, ‘that she performed unacceptably.’
“Somewhere around I have a list of all the grievances I had against her. I was prepared to put them into my portion of the performance paper.”
Admired and sometimes criticized for his raw candor, Mr. Gourley said his beefs could be condensed into a single sentence:
“Myrna wouldn’t do anything we told her to do.
“Here is a classic example: Three times we told her ‘we will not make those (teacher) cuts.’ And she brought those cuts back in front of us four times.”
Mr. Gourley wanted to obtain information from former Asst. Supt. (for business) David El Fattal. “At first he ignored the request,” Mr. Gourley said. “Then I asked Myrna to ask him again. Quite frankly, he let me know he had the information but he didn’t have to give it to me.”
Despite the rocky rhetorical terrain, Mr. Gourley was not to be denied. “Eventually I got the information because I insisted upon it,” he said, “and I had at least two members of the Board, maybe four, insisting on the sane information.
“So my evaluation of Myrna was going to be negative. She was by no means acceptable.”
However, several weeks ahead of the evaluations, Dr. Coté announced she was resigning and transferring to a crosstown district.
(To be continued)
