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It's Time To Apply A Board Of Education To The School Board

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By STEVE OTTO | The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 28, 2008

"So what do you do," I asked my schoolteacher wife, "when your entire class gets out of hand? Do you send them down to the principal's office or whack 'em in the back of the neck with a ruler, or do you just have them write down something 500 times on the blackboard?"

I knew she wasn't going to go with the ruler in the back of the neck thing. I haven't seen that since third grade in Rapid City, S.D. And that was only because the teacher snuck up behind me as I was about to spin my protractor off my pencil in retaliation against the kid next to me who nailed me with a rubber band. Man, I can still feel that sting.

My wife, the Frau, runs a tight class and got a perplexed look when I asked about an entire group going nuts.

"I'm trying to figure out what would be the best way to handle the school board members," I told her. "They've got another meeting coming up Tuesday, and if they keep up the whining and kicking each other under the table, I'm afraid the whole thing could get out of control."

Most of the mail last week was on the same subject, because the members of the school board found themselves in a snit, whining about who was abusing the board's travel budget the most.

"I have been teaching for more than 25 years," wrote one teacher, who asked that her name not be used because she wants to continue teaching, "and I have watched sadly as, year after year, our time and teaching tools have been taken away from us. There have been some fine educators on the school board in the past, but now it seems as if all they care about now are padding their own lives."

One of the Frau's complaints in recent years has been the cutback on field trips. She teaches in a less-advantaged school where these trips are often the only exposure her students will have to certain things. You can imagine how she felt reading about some of the trips taken by the current school board.

Put Them Out To Pasture

Linda Smith of Lutz wrote in, submitting her own "Top Ten Suggested Field Trips For Board Members":

1. An apartment in central Tampa, where a single-parent family is asked to pay $12 for any given field trip.

2. A fourth-grade social studies classroom in Lutz, where students who can read three grade levels above their peers are thumbing through grade-level textbooks to "travel" around the world.

3. A transportation department meeting where people who can't read maps or tell time make decisions about which kids will walk 1.5 miles to a dark bus stop by a swampy ditch and a busy road.

4. The interview of a new middle school math teacher, where the right questions might be about her past and her commitment to education.

5. The trial of a school administrator caught dealing crack from his office.

6. A magnet school - to see whether it's worth the two-hour round trip from suburbia.

7. A high school booster club carwash, where the goal is to raise airfare to get to a performance.

8. Tampa International Airport, to see that there are fewer taxpayer families flying out to great cities because the economy is so bad.

9. Any 12-step program where a "personal inventory" is required.

10. The Patel Conservatory, to learn how to put on a better farce.

OK, I didn't quite understand all of those either, but I do know it's still summer vacation. If this board can't get its act together by the time school starts - and we have a general election as well - we may have to find that teacher who could snap that ruler on the backs of some necks.

Not The Ottobahn

Finally, there was the letter from Patrick Durkin, who obviously was lost in the fens and bogs of Hillsborough County.

"Greetings, Steve. I was surprised to see you had a street named after you and he enclosed some photos of the road sign. Getting streets named after you is quite the thing in these parts. Take Lee Roy Selmon. He has an expressway. That has to be the top dog in street naming. Then we have Bruce B. Downs. He gets both his first name and middle initial.

"Now Otto Road is just a half-mile in length but has five speed bumps. If speed bumps count for anything then you have all the others beat by half a mile."

Thanks, Patrick, but my guess is the county isn't about to name a street after a newspaper columnist. A speed bump, maybe, but not likely.

Keyword, Otto Graphs, to read and comment on Steve Otto's blog.

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