Good morning.

The first day of summer in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 82. Sunrise is 5:16 and sunset is 8:36, for 15 hours, 20 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 30.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1975, the film Jaws is released in the United States, becoming the highest-grossing film of that time and starting the trend of films known as ‘summer blockbusters.’ See also Think you know ‘Jaws’? Test your knowledge with this trivia ahead of the movie’s 50th anniversary, Associated Press, June 19, 2025.
The Whitewater Unified School District, in a 6.19.25 press release, has now announced that Samuel Karns, formerly of the Beloit School District, will be Whitewater’s new school superintendent.

The district’s press release appears above, with a few remarks below:
1. One wishes Whitewater’s new superintendent the best, truly. This is a district with several challenges, not the least of which is a faction that insists it’s a district with no challenges. It’s reasonable, absent some unexpected development, to give this new superintendent a full school year to settle into his role.
2. Of those challenges: a community that is divided politically and culturally, an outgoing superintendent who has shown contempt for open government and dialogue, a school board that has shown contempt for open government and dialogue, an administration and school board with a tolerance for their own below-average performance, a number of administrators who should not have been hired over these last five years, and too many people who have been emotional rather than composed in addressing these failings.
3. This libertarian blogger has approached these matters dispassionately, with sangfroid, so I’ll state plainly: I’ll never understand how this outgoing superintendent enthralled some and discombobulated others. Over these five years, I have been unimpressed and unfazed.
4. Whitewater’s students have deserved better performance, and some, admirably, have managed to do well even in difficult times.
5. Addressing all this is not quite a supertask, yet it will be difficult. No one should expect sudden progress (although a change from an autocratic administrative approach to a normal approach of give-and-take will, undoubtedly, be a meaningful improvement).
This community will have to decide what it wants: a minimal level of accord among factions, incremental progress, or wholesale reform?
A variation on a venerable expression: Central Office won’t be rebuilt in a day.
Once malnourished, hairless bear is now fully furred: