Danville, City of the Lost

Danville has the unique ability to turn molehills into mountains and creating boogie men where they don’t exist. On the other hand they tend to take real important issues and sweep them under the rug with the broom of apathy. Several issues locally have brought this issue more to light. An issue “swept under the rug” is the fact that two more experienced administrators from the Danville Public Schools have “put in their papers” to retire. Not a peep from the school board about this epidemic and of course the local fish wrap masquerading as a paper doesn’t know a thing about it. Well when you fire all the good people at the paper, make reporters hourly employees, and turn the printing of the paper over to a facility hundreds of miles from Danville then I say you have a problem. The only way the paper would get a real story was if it ran into their building. Then again if it was after five o’clock they would miss that also. Enough about them. The loss of experienced administrators is just the tip of the iceberg with DPS. The average experience level of a DPS school administrator is just under four years. Most of us have shoes older then most administrators. Why is this important? Danville was once a proud district with well known administrators known around the state and the nation. Several former administrators traveled throughout the country lecturing and presenting to a multitude of school officials. That was when DPS was a respected organization. Now, it is joke among other districts. A tyrannical leadership, a fast and free budget, and a school board that have their collective heads so far in the sands that they may strike oil. The flagship high school GW, is just a mere shadow of its former grandness. It has been reduced to an “expulsion” academy with students “eliminated” from the population for minor infractions. Pretty soon the custodians will outnumber the students. The many trophies in the front office ought to be turned around so they would not have to witness the demise of a once great institution. Continuing the saga of “The Rise and Fall of DPS” is the former flavor of the day, Galileo. This experiment was like Madame Curie’s experience with radiation. Her work was important but she died from radiation poisoning. The same is true for Galileo. It was built up so much that it is dying from its own trumped up success. The downtown administration was always so quick to throw up Galileo to the press as the “golden child” that they started to believe their own hype. But with all false idols the covering of gold covered a lead base. Just scratch the surface a little and you find out what it really is. It was marketed as a “super academy” but in fact was merely a way parents tried to have a private school at public cost. The cost per child is almost three times the district average yet the results are not worth the cost. Galileo’s IB (International Baccalaureate) program never really got off the ground. Students never bought into the program and it has fallen by the wayside. The promised space age technology never materialized as is evident by the specially designed virtual reality lab. What is it used for now? It is a storeroom for textbooks. The rush and overtime expense of the new chemistry/physics lab was all for naught also. The lab was months behind schedule, way over budget, and still not completed. But what else is new? Has anything in the district been on time, on budget, or sensible in the last four years? So as the people in Danville worry about uranium mining like Chicken Little, something is going on right under their noses and no one seems to care. It they did there would be lines of people getting petitions to run for the school board. But there aren’t. And so it goes in Gotham, not even the Bat Signal from the roof of the municipal building would help. Now a Bat Signal from the new school board digs would be something. Unfortunately it would probably be late and over budget.