Thursday, December 22, 2011

Audit calls for overhaul of JCPS central office

Outside experts' report assails favoritism, 
biased hiring, unqualified personnel

This from the The Courier-Journal:
Jefferson County Public Schools’ administration is riddled with favoritism, biased hiring and unqualified personnel and should be overhauled, according to a disparaging report released Tuesday by two outside experts hired to examine the district’s central office.

The 70-page report — the result of an organizational review ordered by the school board this summer — also states that in some cases, administrators are overpaid based on the current marketplace and when compared to other school districts.

“We see this report as a start of a conversation that the superintendent will need to have with the school board and the community in Jefferson County about the future of the central-office staffing,” said the report’s co-author, Fenwick English, a professor of educational leadership at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The bottom line, English said, is that JCPS must realign its central office — retooling 31 positions to establish better support to its 155 schools and eliminating five other positions that the auditors say are unnecessary...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wonder what Fenwick Englisg gets paid for these "audits?" He did one on a rural school district in South Carolina in 1994-1995 and, afterwards, the Central Office suddenly became a lot smaller with forced retirements.

For those who might not remember, Fenwick English used to be on the faculty of the College of Education.

Anonymous said...

Best thing they could do is break this mammoth organization down into some smaller districts ala Northern Kentucky. Jefferson County is another operational galaxy compared to 90% of this state's typical districts. I have no idea how you could sustain an supervisory hierarchy nessisary to oversee every school in this district. I wonder, if like our own government, anyone really is able to monitor or evaluate what is even going on in order to establish a genuinely accurate picture of all these schools as one collective district