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Fired but not gone yet, Jara still roiling CCSD
Recently fired CCSD Superintendent Jesus Jara started out his first week as a lame duck by announcing he was giving raises to 16 of his top staffers – including 15 currently employed people and one Chief Information Officer to be named later. Then, the Trustees who are loyal to the ousted superintendent derailed an attempt […]
Cirque du CCSD
The Clark County School District’s latest environmental performance piece Thursday was one of the best theatrical spectacles I have ever had the pleasure of attending. It was funny. It was infuriating. It had unexpected plot twists. It had suspense. A lot of suspense. It was incredibly interactive. And, ultimately, it came to a resolution. A […]
Will Jara’s dictatorial tendencies come back to bite him?
“Don’t use my name.” “I never spoke to you.” “Somebody’s got to expose what’s happening here, Carrie.” “It’s a culture of retaliation.” “They give us responsibility, then set out to undermine us so we will fail.” These are actual quotes – chosen from a bevy I’ve collected over the last couple of years – that […]
Well, THAT’s specious
Regular readers of my columns will not be surprised to learn that I have favorite words. “Hyperbole” is one. I love the way it rolls off the tongue, though I don’t love when people exemplify it. “Onomatopoeia” is another. I mean, seriously, what a fun word to say. And I love the idea that there […]
How mean girls work, or why the CCSD Trustees are the most sexist group I’ve ever seen
Last week I wrote about speech in public meetings. Today I want to talk about something courts have pretty much avoided, which is the ways in which people use speech. Not what is said, but how we say it. A few years ago, I happened upon the movie “Seeing Allred” on Netflix. There was a […]
The First Amendment and public meetings: It’s complicated.
On June 24, the CCSD Board of Trustees meeting was delayed several times by disruptive behavior, heckling and verbal threats, which created, for many people, an atmosphere of hostility. At the next Trustee meeting, on July 8, Trustee Lola Brooks laid the blame for the prior meeting’s disruption at the feet of board president Linda […]
Principals vs. teachers
Ladies and Gentlemen (and non-binary and gender fluid individuals) welcome to the intermediate round of The Fight Over Control of Our Schools. In one corner we have AB469, the 2017 bill that created Clark County School District reorganization, represented by THE PRINCIPALS! In the other corner, we have… the UNIONS, represented by… lots of people […]
They’re NOT racists. Just ask them.
“The lady doth protests too much, methinks.” So says Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, during the play within a play scene toward the end of Hamlet. Shakespeare’s Danish prince has constructed the play so he could show his mother and his uncle/stepfather that he knows they killed his father. Gertrude is reacting with annoyance to the character […]
A CCSD Passion Play, Act 2: Waiting for God… Oh?
Yesterday I wrote about the latest environmental performance piece produced by the Clark County School District Board of Trustees – otherwise known as their bi-weekly meeting. Today we’re going to talk about the through-line of the piece, the central idea of the performance – whether to prop up The Man. Let’s go over the characters […]
A CCSD passion play, act 1: ‘Tis Mad Idolatry
I love environmental theatre. Maria Irene Fornes’ enigmatic avant garde piece, “Fefu and Her Friends,” has been a fave since college days. The show takes place in four rooms of a home in which the audience walks through, spending 10 minutes with each story. It has a cast of eight women, and was regarded as […]
CCSD: If you can’t beat ‘em, bribe ‘em
Supt. Jesus Jara has tried since he arrived in 2018 to undermine both the school reorganization law (AB469) and the administrators who have been defending it. Regular readers know he tried an end run around principals last summer, attempting to con the Legislature into centralizing control over carryover funds, which are now controlled by individual […]
Things that make me scratch my head
There are things in life that just make me scratch my head. I’ve learned to shrug it off. For instance, when my kids were younger, I wondered – and actually wrote about – why Hannah Montana never, until the last season, mentioned her mother, who died sometime before she was 12. I mean, isn’t losing […]