To The Reader’s Forum:

If a school wants to create chaos and destabilization and demoralize its teaching faculty, follow this school’s 12-step format. Results guaranteed!

Hire Principal who operates with 95 percent emotion and five percent logical thinking.

Principal should avoid reading any educational research that would provide guidance in solving education problems. Principal’s thinking should be improvised and spur-of-the-moment. Hop on every bandwagon that comes down the pike.

It’s essential for Principal to implement change upon change upon change to disrupt stability. For example, move all teachers and all teaching materials in the building to different rooms in one grand sweep.

Hold an excessive amount of faculty meetings. When Principal runs out of meeting ideas, place the burden on teachers to choose topics. If topics are unsuitable or non-applicable to the entire faculty, force teachers to designate another person with whom they will have a meeting.

Hire Superintendent who tells faculty and union that Superintendent “understands” destabilization created by Principal. Superintendent should do nothing to ameliorate the issues.

Research? Don’t give it a second thought. Do faculty and students really need an educated, knowledgeable Principal leader?

Purchase expensive Mastery Manager program that has no research support and requires a lot of busy paper work for teachers. When the program fails, quietly “forget” to collect the busy work. Hide the boondoggle expenditure from the taxpaying public.

Force teachers to teach outside their certification area. This will stress out individuals and lead to more destabilization.

Pay for on-line courses. Distant teachers will teach local students. District certified teachers will work as aides keeping order while distant teachers teach. This lowers local teacher self-esteem, thus more demoralization. Raise taxes to cover double expenditures for on-line courses plus certified teacher monitors.

Ignore teacher input and ideas. Principal needs only two maxims: “This is my school!” and “I’ll do it my way!”

Principal should pick favorites and let faculty know who is in favor and who is out of favor.

To accomplish these goals, a weak board of education is imperative. Rather than fire disrupting Principal, the board merely should propose that Principal resign. If Principal refuses, the board then should acquiesce, allowing Principal to continue pursuing project of destabilization and demoralization.

Deann Nelson

Jamestown