The Schmitt family

Dear Mr. McQuillan:

I have received your letter of July 19, 2010, and am concerned about the number of questions which remain unanswered while apparently leading to your dismissal of my complaint. I have a number of questions for which a response would help me better understand your specific concerns or lack of jurisdiction.

It is also my belief that after addressing the following specific issues, you will reconsider my request for an investigation. The following numbered items summarize the background of each point and conclude with the questions in bold type. (more…)

A Performance Review is a process through which someone who is assigned responsibility is evaluated. Most of us have had reviews, so lets put them into perspective.

Imagine that your own particular function had two major responsibilities, one of which includes an associated deadline. You miss the deadline for the latter, then find an unrelated problem in the contract defining it. So, instead of fixing that problem you unilaterally void the whole thing and decide that the contract doesn’t exist. And you won’t explain to your employer why you did it. And you extend your own deadline by 41 more days to complete a task you’ve known about for 7 months and blame it on the person you replaced. Then you miss the deadline you set yourself and tell your employer  that you need another 31 days. And you will now take funds intended for your first responsibility to pay a 3rd party to perform your second responsibility according to new rules you just made up. Then, you need another two weeks. Meanwhile, your treatment of your second responsibility is directly causing attrition in the ranks of the people who execute your first responsibility.

The first responsibility is educating our children. The second responsibility is the Performance Review of the Superintendent. We are the employers. The Oxford Board of Education has missed a contractual deadline, used a separate issue to make that deadline go away, missed it’s substituted deadlines twice, paid someone to do its job using money intended for our children, lost a Business Manager and Assistant in the Main Office, and a Principal, in the process, and has still not completed its assigned task.

What do you think your review would look like? Is there a check-box for incompetent?

I was not permitted to have a dog, growing up. My Mom had a fear of them. Later we learned that she had had a dog at one point when she was growing up and that one day she was just gone. Probably entered into the whole thing somewhere.

We bought our own first house, in Trumbull, in 1981. A year or so later, Ross, who was the marketing guy I worked with, convinced me that it was time to get a dog. Nancy always had a dog when she was growing up and had been after me for a while, but I think Ross pushed me over the top. It helped that his wife was really into Golden Retrievers.

His wife, Chantal, had a dog named Fathom. He was the dog catching the Frisbee in the old Kodak commercials. She connected us with a breeder named Annette, of Classic Goldens, and we were off to the races. (more…)

I submitted the following to Voices today:

Arrogance can be tolerated when it is earned through Professional Competence. The current Oxford BOE exemplifies Arrogant Professional Incompetence.

They held a “hearing” on the Superintendents contract, refusing to answer questions from the public, and cut off comments criticizing the Board, even though they directly caused the quandary in which the Board and Town now finds itself.

They received critical letters, yet stated “No Correspondence” at the following meeting.

In violation of their Oath to obey the laws of Connecticut, they failed to hold a petitioned hearing within the generous 3 week public window provided by law.

They hold meetings of the officers without posting them or providing minutes in violation of FOI and without including minority representation in violation of State Statute.

They failed to review the Superintendent within the 60 to 90 days required and later declared the contract to be void for reasons they continue to avoid explaining.

They caused the resignation of the Business Manager and Superintendent’s Assistant, leaving the Town with none.

They micro-manage the day to day affairs of the district, directly contradicting the recommended policies of the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education, which states they, “will attempt to confine my board action to policy-making, planning and appraisal…”

They met on the Superintendent’s contract without insuring her attendance or telling her their concern and did the same to the IT Manager (who still does not know). CABE guidelines state they, “will help frame policies and plans only after my board has consulted those who will be affected by its actions.”

Without evidence they have publicly labeled bi-partisan Board criticism as partisan, while CABE ethics dictate they “will refuse to surrender my independent judgment to special interest or partisan political groups.”

They are embarrassing themselves and Oxford.

Dear People:According to Section 10-4b of Chapter 163 regarding State Board of Education, Department of Education, “Any resident of a local or regional school district, or parent or guardian of a student enrolled in the public schools of such school district who has been unable to resolve a complaint with the board of education of such local or regional school district may file with the State Board of Education a complaint in writing.” I am a resident of Oxford, CT. Please consider this letter as my formal request for an investigation of the Oxford, CT, Board of Education which appears to be in violation of both Freedom Of Information Act and General Statute as described below. (more…)

There is a group of people in Oxford that thinks that it’s okay to go after anyone they disagree with. Right now, they’ve decided they don’t like the Superintendent of Schools. As far as I can tell she’s the most popular superintendent we’ve had since we’ve been living here (1991).

Somehow, they keep stating that it’s a political attack on the board. It’s the Democrats. When it’s pointed out that there are Republicans who are against what they are doing, they claim that those Republicans are working for Democrats. The fact that these Republicans have been active in Republican Town politics since before many of them were born isn’t relevant. They’ve attacked my wife and I by name because we got involved. Had they asked, I would have told them that I’ve voted both for Republican and Democrat candidates over the years here. But, I’m a political hack!

The whole concept of participation without partisanship seems inconceivable. They think that FOI rules are technicalities that they get to interpret according to what’s convenient. They’ve stated that they don’t take petitions seriously because anyone will sign whatever their friends put in front of them, even though that is how Town Meeting government works.

As soon as word got around that people would be coming to a scheduled meeting that had been included an audience of citizens, they announced that they could not pull together enough of a quorum to hold the meeting and canceled it. Here’s a hint, people: when you run for an office and are elected, you are expected to attend meetings. I wonder how the absence record of the current Superintendent compares to the record of the current BOE Chair? (more…)

Lets get as many people as possible out on Tuesday, June 15, at 6pm at Oxford High School to support Dr. Palmer.

Dr. Palmer has been a wonderful superintendent. We need to show the Oxford Board of Education what we think of their arbitrary decision to void a contract without first showing a good faith effort to correct whatever language their new attorney may have called into question.

Please show your support on Tuesday.

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In Oxford, we have a Town Meeting form of government with a Board of Selectmen and a Board of Finance.

We also have a Board of Education. The Oxford Board of Education wants to put a metal roof with solar panels on the Oxford Great Oak Middle School to at least try to mitigate the costs of an electrically heated building. So the Oxford Board of Selectmen established a committee to look into the options available. That committee came back with a recommendation to proceed with the metal roof rather than once again going the route of the standard asphalt roof, which has never successfully kept the rain out anyway.

So far, so good. Deciding which way to go is a valid subject for debate. Everyone performed their responsibilities and the process continued. The next step was to send it to the Oxford Board of Finance to review the finances and make a recommendation to the town. That’s where it gets strange. The Oxford Board of Finance decided to review the options. Not the financing options, the roofing options! (more…)

Growing up, there were things of which we were certain; there would always be 12 possible VHF television channels (only about half in any given market concurrently) including 3 networks. UHF stations weren’t ever very big because they didn’t have the same quality signal, though they had more of an impact away from major markets. You could only watch the programming at times of their choosing. And if you wanted to keep connected to the world you saw there you needed to go through a phone company, of which there was exactly one on the list from which to choose.

Most people get their television from something other than over-the-air broadcast today, making the channel 2-13 selection for higher quality television a thing of the past. Those original networks, plus some others, quickly got into cable/satellite systems with other choices. They’ve also made significant portions of their programming over the internet. But the phone company still seems to be working according to their old way of doing business. (more…)

9/11 seems like yesterday. My office was on Hudson Street just north of Canal, which turned out to be the northern end of the exclusion zone for the next few weeks. Amazingly, even though there were a lot of people in the company who lived near or commuted through there, none of our then current employees were physically injured, though someone who had left the company before I arrived was on Flight 93, which fought the hijackers.

I was just north of the city when the first plane hit and turned around. I was on the phone with a co-worker for a bit who had already arrived at the office and who was watching from a conference room window as the second came in. It all seemed unreal. I turned around to go home. I did think to call home and to call my parents on the way. Both knew I was supposed to be in the city. Fortunately, my wife then thought to call the schools my kids were attending. The schools had put the news on in the classrooms. We live a distance from New York, and there are not a lot of people who commute to New York, so it had apparently not occurred to anyone that there might be direct connections to any of the kids. The front office dispatched people to let my own kids know that I was okay and on  my way home.

A few of us set up a web page for getting information to and from our co-workers who were scattered around the city and beyond and managed to track almost everybody down within a day or so. Our offices were closed until about a week later. Several of us did manage to meet there on 9/14 to see if there was any damage to the offices or systems, which we had managed to keep running remotely until then. We had not lost power or any of our data lines, and somehow it seemed strange to see the quiet desks and running equipment unscathed except for some dust that came through the elevator shafts. Outside, it looked like a war zone.

Sometime later, I was at my desk and waiting “on hold” on the telephone for someone. I idly pulled up the New York Times web site on my computer while I waited. On the side of the front page, they were running a series of brief bios of people that had been lost. That day the first person I saw was a guy I had been in Cub Scouts with.

Another strange thing I remember in the following weeks was the sight of cars scattered through the parking lots of Metro North Railroad that were clearly not being moved at night and beginning to collect dust. It took a few days before people realized that these belonged to people who weren’t coming home.