Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 59. Sunrise is 7:22 and sunset is 5:55 for 10 hours 33 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 21.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1881, the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral takes place in Tombstone, Arizona.
On Tuesday, at a meeting of the Whitewater Common Council, the Whitewater Unified School District’s superintendent, Samuel Karns, presented his goals.
I’ve written before that one should wait about a year to see if this new superintendent’s approach has begun to make a difference. That’s a sound approach. This district has been ideologically divided among its constituent communities, has been professionally divided among its faculty, and tensions that were present before the pandemic have grown worse afterward. An autocratic administrative approach these last five years and a closed-government approach that saw some community members as adversaries made academic goals almost secondary to political controversy and managerial overreach.
Meeting after meeting wasted on funding about the aquatic center or a school resource officer are examples of frivolous endeavors styled as serious ones.
The district has been a dark field into which open government principles and a collaborative approach go to wither and die. There have been supporters of this approach — of course, of course — on the school board and in the community. See Yesteryear’s Familiar Tune.
And yet, even among those of a given ideology, there was division and discord. Backbiting, ankle-biting, — lots of biting among people who shouldn’t have been biting anyone. In general: the district tends toward an insider-outsider divide. Insiders imagine themselves (as is common in these divides) to be more insightful, more talented. (There’s no evidence of this imagined superiority, in fact, but then some people are Flat Earthers against all evidence to the contrary.)
If this district’s new superintendent and its existing board can, during his tenure, manage to avoid the governance mistakes of the last five years, establish a better relationship with the community, and make genuine academic progress, then Whitewater and the smaller towns of the district will be better for it.
A slow but steady recuperation would do the Whitewater Unified School District well.
Rare ‘red lightning’ captured in timelapse video by New Zealand photographer: