[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]I am confident all five members of the School Board will disagree this afternoon, but the conviction is inescapable that El Marino Language School got away with one last night.
As almost every observant person in the School District predicted seven months ago when the ruckus over El Marino’s very special adjuncts, or teaching aides, first emerged.
No one else has them.
No one else can, even if they bring apples for the teachers and buy their principals a whole orchard.
Special is special, pal.
Not everybody is.
If you don’t think the El Marino family rightly feels superior to the rest of the District, you do not know human nature. Last night’s six-page agreement was the clincher for any naive persons.
El Marino prevailed over the School District and all others within the Culver City kingdom because – the best of all reasons – they can.
The School Board inarguably finished second behind El Marino in this Who Is Stronger taffy pull, showing all who is in charge.
The Only Other Choice
If the Board had ruled that it was grandfathering in the programmatic concept that no other school has or is allowed to have, I believe most parents would have gone home mollified.
On a related matter dealing with embedded School Board policy, an amendment was approved last night shrewdly, helpfully, conveniently removing an obligation for anyone in the District office or at El Marino to lower his eyes in guilt over the deed that went down.
Under the disarming headline “Board Policy, Use of Private Funds for Supplemental Employment,” the last paragraph of the original agreement, probably on lawyerly advice, was hurriedly kicked through a trapdoor so Board members could sidestep guilt and avoid feeling obliged to treat all schools equally.
Ooooh, sticky, nasty, messy, gooey.
Nobody said life is fair.
District leaders and others must have said a thousand times last spring that, by Murgatroyd, “We treat everybody the same.”
Right.
Did they mean it? Who knows?
Is there no difference between the sun and the moon?
The District and Board treat everyone the same – until they are overwhelmed. Or talked out of their principles by a stronger party, I guess.
The excised paragraph read:
“The Board is required to ensure that all District schools are treated equally and fairly in order that all District students have equal access to District educational programs and services.”
Sounds noble, doesn’t it.
Look closer. It is configured like a doughnut.
For the healthy consciences of all involved, the nobility of those 30 words was consigned to the vacuous space in the middle.
You cannot be noble and surrender in a single motion, which was the retreating Board’s grievous miscalculation. You can’t run forward and backward simultaneously.
