Don’t feel badly if you did not know until yesterday, when this newspaper reported the news, that Dr. Pam Magee is leaving in 10 minutes as the principal of Culver City High School.
Outside of Dr. Magee’s tight inner circle, she did a model job of weatherproofing.
Although peers knew in March, in the aftermath of the highest profile incident of her six years, that she was shopping, not a leak sprang.
No rumors seem to have floated beyond the campus.
Supt. Patti Jaffe says she didn’t know until two days ago.
School Board President Scott Zeidman said he did not know until two days ago.
Swift Turnaround
“This happened really, really fast,” said Ms. Jaffe, who is completing a raucous 12-month spin herself, first as the Interim Super, and since March 14 as the Permanent Super, armed with a one-year contract.
Dr. Magee starts immediately as the virtual Superintendent with the title Chief Administrative Officer of Palisades Charter High School in the smart seaside community of Pacific Palisades. Her hundred-thousand-dollar-plus salary and her scope of authority both will leap exponentially.
Here is the Irony of the Week:
When the Pali position opened two years ago, Ms. Jaffe inquired.
“After talking to them, though, I was not interested,” she told the newspaper.
Declaring that she had just signed her first Palisades contract, Ms. Magee made her departure announcement on Wednesday.
Speaking of Jobs
Ms. Jaffe said that Culver City’s principal opening will be posted on educator sites later this afternoon or Monday. “We probably will be interviewing candidates mid- to late July,” she said. Although July 1 is the date the job officially opens, the new person should be in place by Aug. 1.
Ms. Jaffe said that former Supt. Dr. Myrna Rivera Coté predicted a year ago when the principal obtained her doctorate that she soon would be leaving for a loftier job.
However, campus wisdom says that her decision is inexorably tied to last winter’s bitter flap with drama teacher Sheila Silver that sparked a student uprising. After months of meetings over Ms. Silver’s methods, Dr. Magee fired her the first week of February and 14 days later, the School Board unfired her.
It was days after that unseemly clash of power bases that the principal let it be known she was looking for a new address.
Two weeks after Ms. Silver’s job was handed back to her, the same executive search group the School Board hired last autumn to find a Superintendent went to work for Pali High. They met with the school’s 11-member Board of Trustees. The headhunters told the trustees that — unlike their Culver City experience — they did not want community members joining in (or messing up) the search. By April 28, they had their woman, they felt.
Mr. Zeidman of the School Board had a lengthy chat with Dr. Magee yesterday afternoon in her office. “I did not know she was leaving until Wednesday,” he said, “when she said she was leaving,” he said.
