Dear Stamford residents who are circulating this ridiculous petition
parent vote of no confidence on Dr Tamu Lucero, the Stamford Public Schools
(SPS) Superintendent along with lifelong Stamford resident and current SPS assistant
superintendent Amy Bellotti, what is your end game?
Is the goal of this petition to get them both fired? Well Dr Lucero just had her contract renewed,
so it will cost the city a significant amount of money to fire her unless you
can find an egregious breach of contract.
Note, you won’t find one. It will
cost us at least the value of the contract, a termination fee, and probably
legal fees as she will most assuredly sue the city for wrongful termination,
and this assumes no additional penalties or fees associated with these
terminations. I am not sure the details
of Mrs Beldotti’s contract, but I assume it has similar provisions. So let’s assume it will cost the taxpayers more
fees and ultimately result in all of us paying higher taxes. So clearly if this is your goal then you obviously
have no issues with the city paying for these costs and our tax dollars going
up, and not having one cent of that increase go to any of the additional grievances
you have listed in this childish petition.
On top of the costs associated with termination, we now need
to determine who is going to be the interim superintendent while we begin a new
search. Do you like the other associate
superintendents even though they are not listed in your petty grievance
petition? Or do we bring an outsider in
to babysit the district for another year or two until a permanent candidate can
be sourced and seated? We will need to hire
a search firm to source superintendent candidates. Even if you do want one of
the other local candidates, a search firm still needs to be hired to ensure there
is fairness in the process. But who
would want to come to Stamford and lead our schools knowing our teachers and
parents openly and publicly revolted against the previous administration? Are we going to attract a world class mind in
education, who is going to help address your lengthy list of grievances or are
we going to bring a relatively inexperienced person who needs a steppingstone
for a few years to get them experienced enough to move into another job? Note,
more likely the latter than the former
If you are alright paying all these fees, then I assume you
have no issues with Dr Lucero suing the school board for harassment, which by
the way they found evidence that harassment did exist in her workplace. Note:
her actions were justified. Since you
are alright with wastefully spending our tax dollars on things that don’t go
directly into the classroom then I know were that all at the BoE, BoR and BoF
budget hearings over the past few months demanding more money and resources to
address these issues that you so eloquently put into this petition? Note: You were not there since there were not
since about 17 people or so who showed up to support the budget at all these
meetings. Guilty admission: I wasn’t there
either.
So instead, you jump on a bandwagon of Stamford hate, talking
about how great Stamford used to be, opining about a world that never existed
and signing this petition. It begs the
question,
·
Have you attempted to speak with Dr. Lucero or
Mrs Beldotti in person? My experience is
they are always open to hear from the community and speak to people who often
have divergent opinions of their own and discuss with them how they plan on
addressing your lengthy list of high-level wretchedness?
·
Do you have a plan or an idea to address these
issues that can fit in a budget that just lost $2M when the Board of
Representatives slashed the budget?
·
Have you once considered the fact that we are
(hopefully) on the back end of a global pandemic and many of these issues that
you cite in this petition might reflect that event and not single-handedly laid
at the feet of the current superintendent?
Could the administration have done things differently, sure
but as multiple people said there is no playbook for schools handling a
pandemic and if they were they would be dated from 1920. Ask yourself, what are you willing to do to
help the schools become better, besides sign this petition? Taking your kids out of public schools or
moving to another town does not solve the problem. Turn around your energy and ask your building
principals what you can do to help them out.
They will be so appreciative of your outreach.
Meanwhile, after the firings are over, we still won’t be
able to implement any block scheduling system since no one will be able to run
the implementation. This will negatively
impact the students in Westhill and Stamford.
If we continue with the current scheduling in this building students
will be prohibited from graduating since they are unable to achieve the
necessary requirements which is the underlying reason to change to a 4x4 block
schedule or the beloved AITE beloved A/B schedule. If no change is made, then we risk even greater
damage to our fine city because even more students will not graduate as they
lack credits. Hmm, this seems short-sighted
and costly in multiple ways. But yeah
lets proceed with signing this petition.
Speaking of block scheduling, I have always been the biggest
proponent of teachers both here in the city of Stamford and all to all my
friends nationally that have chosen this profession. However, to say this administration did not
consult with teachers is patently false.
These discussions all took place prior to this little pandemic thing
breaking out. Yes, the conversation was
tabled in 2020, but you had a seat at the table and perhaps the communications
of this plan was not handled perfectly but you were consulted and involved. Perhaps the administration could have done a
better job of informing the teachers that this was coming, but I am sick of the
whining from both teachers and parents that they were not involved in the process. Again, everything I have seen and everything I
have read indicates that both Dr. Lucero and Mrs. Beldotti have made multiple attempts
to reach out to the teachers across the district to work more closely and address
some of these issues. But the teachers
keep throwing up roadblocks and sending out press releases with no confidence
votes by tenured teachers, why is that?
What do you want the administration to do? Resign in mass? That’s not happening!!
If the goal is not to get them fired, then what? You have a created a long list of grievances,
where is your action plan? Are you
simply going to go to the Board of Education meetings and taking your 3 minutes
to complain about how incompetent they are?
Note: They are very competent and have the best interest of all 16,000
student in their plans
Finally, where is the teacher’s union in all of this? Why are the individual tenured teachers in 5 (Westhill,
AITE, Turn of River, Davenport, and Strawberry Hill) out 21 schools banding
together to put out these politically motivated statements and not engaging
their union to speak on their behalf? Mostly
likely because they don’t have a majority and they want to upset the apple cart
to keep the status quo, which is simply unacceptable. Note: 5 is not a majority of 21.
So, in
conclusion, NO Dr Lucero and Mrs Beldotti are ABSOLUTELY NOT destroying our
schools. They are bending over backwards to make this district better for
all students of all socio-economic strata that make up our beautiful and diverse
city. Are Stamford Public schools perfect? No, but I think they are far
from being destroyed. I think
there are a ton of dedicated administrators, principals, teachers, parents and
other community members who want to see our schools thrive and succeed for all
students.
However,
if some stakeholders continue to accentuate all the negatives about our beloved
institutions then yes they will eventually be destroyed by the perception that
this negativity causes resulting in a diminished investment of time and
money of the public which is necessary to help make the schools better over the
long run.
