Cirque du FSD

What kind of circus is FSD Ringmaster Lynn Thornley running? One that promotes kiddie antics and award ceremonies over legitimate board business.

The hyper-analytical Chris Thompson put together this chart of FSD meeting time spent wallowing in tomfoolery vs. legitimate school board business:

Now with 50% more fluff.

In Tuesday’s meeting, Thompson was fighting to bring an end to former Superintendent Cameron McCune’s laptop extortion scheme (thousands of dollars taken from parents by pressuring them to buy expensive Apple laptops.) But Lynn Thornley did everything she could to cut off debate and move to a quick vote HERE.

This haste occurred in meeting of which over an hour was dedicated to Cub Scout flag ceremonies, awards, various glad-handing, and a lady dancing around with a quilt over her head.

No joke:

The end result? Watch here as Thompson makes his case to end this boondoggle, debate is cut short and Trustee Berryman is run over, abstaining on an issue because she wasn’t given a chance to ask questions. The decision was rammed through anyway, leaving individual families to spend about $174,000 of their own money to keep this sinking technology program temporarily afloat.

Total time spent on legitimate discussion: 18 minutes.

Epic Fail!

I hear the train a comin'...

Scott Martindale of the Register has posted this shocking revelation that two-thirds of JC students in OC fail to get any sort of diploma or certification after six years.

That’s a pretty damning indictment of a system that sucks in billions of tax dollars in this State every year and that is opaquely run by local boards of trustees composed of educrats, geriatric featherheads, and assorted big-government apologists.

Apparently, our community colleges are largely acting as baby sitters for late teens and early twenty-somethings who seem to be more interested in putting off a serious confrontation with the working life than with education. Harsh? Yes. Oversimplistic? Maybe. But consider that through the JCs in OC we are subsidizing the educational infrastructure for over a hundred thousand people at any given time who will never graduate.

And then contemplate the vast, breathtakingly compensated hierarchy of admninstrators that administer this  Empire of Failure and tell me the system ain’t broken.

432 More Teachers and Admins with Nothing To Complain About

Last week we looked at the number of FSD employees who make over $90k. Now let’s see the salaries of Fullerton Joint Union High School District teachers and administrators for the 2009-10 school year.

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Wow. Four hundred and thirty-two of them earn over $90,000 per year. Some of them teach a little extra summer school while others get stipends for CERT training, coaching badminton or being a leader. There’s also a secretary and a couple of custodian supervisors who earned over $60k in overtime alone.

You can look at this data any way you want, but it’s hard to deny that Fullerton’s educators are very well compensated. The myth of the “poor, underpaid teacher” is crushed.

Bonus Trivia

Which FFFF blogger spent several years molding the young minds of Fullerton’s high schoolers back in the 1980’s?

Man, I shoulda kept at it.