Published in the June 12 Leader
The Fox School District and its top brass last week pulled off an excellent Charles Dickens revival. They were putting on a play in the old barn called, “A Tale of Two School Districts.”
The lead sentence from the original held up nicely for the 21st Century production.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.”
It’s not possible that the long-dead Brit author could have been thinking about the Fox district when he penned his classic, but he nailed it nonetheless.
Until recently, it was the best of times for Superintendent Dianne Critchlow. She was still in her 30s when she was elevated to superintendent of the district that had educated her, hired her as a teacher, promoted her to administration, then showered her with money as superintendent.
As that was happening, her bosses on the school board nodded their heads when her future husband wanted to be an administrator, too. Big salaries, early retirement beckoning with a huge pension – the best of times.
Then someone at their home anonymously started writing allegedly obscene and defamatory posts online about people who criticized the Critchlows and the district. Those people got an attorney who sued for the account information. A judge ordered it turned over. Turns out the comments came from the Critchlow home, the home of two other Fox administrators and the home of two retired Fox educators.
It was junior high stuff – the worst of times – and an enormous embarrassment to the district.
The rest of Dickens’ lead sentence is self-explanatory. School districts are supposed to dispense wisdom. Instead, the taxpayers got foolishness and another dose of Chet Pleban.
Way back in 2000, Pleban was the showman lawyer who nicked Fox for $373,000 when the board fired former Superintendent Diana Bourisaw soon after signing her to a new three-year contract. Back then, Fox superintendents only made a lousy $125,000 or so per year.
Critchlow’s salary, which she is still receiving after being put on paid administrative leave last week, is $260,598 annually.
So now she, too, has hired Pleban, who certainly did right by Bourisaw, to represent her.
Bourisaw, however, hadn’t been involved in any scandal. Her biggest sins had been to change the name of Christmas break to winter break, which enraged the religiously conservative members on the board back then, and to call underlings “worker bees.”
After Bourisaw left, Fox turned to one of its own, homegrown Jim Chellew, a lifer with Fox, to right the ship as superintendent. He did a great job mending fences, got tax issues passed to pay for major facility upgrades and generally restored sanity and confidence.
When Chellew decided to retire in 2005, he championed Dianne Brown (Critchlow) as his successor. She was hired at $135,217, a salary that nearly doubled in nine years.
As this is written, Critchlow, her husband Jamie, plus administrators Dan and Angela Baker all remain on the payroll. (The Bakers are the other current administrators named in the Internet controversy.) The four of them make $648,108 annually, with the Critchlows pulling down the lion’s share ($484,677).
Presumably these are important jobs, considering their six-figure pay, so in addition to embarrassing the district, the foursome has left Fox in the lurch with four key people suddenly not there.
Dianne Critchlow was going to retire in October 2015 at age 49. Based on her years of service and salary, she would have collected an annual pension in excess of $140,000.
Recently, she asked the board to move her retirement date up to October of this year, so it’s pretty clear she’s not coming back. In fact, the Fox board had begun the search for a new superintendent.
What about the other three?
The school board has the summer to try to sort things out. There will be lawyers. There will be negotiations. There may or may not be an attempt to figure out who in each of the households made the postings online.
The district will want to investigate and make it go away ASAP. The plaintiffs in the original suit will not.
They now have named defendants (until the plaintiffs’ lawyer got the account information, the defendants were called John Doe). They smell blood – or money – in the water, and being activist complainers anyway, it’s unlikely they’ll back down easily. A key question is whether the plaintiffs and their lawyer will try to include the Fox School District in the suit as a defendant.
More lawyers. More stories. More embarrassment.
Long term, there is a more crucial question, even more important than sorting out lawsuits and settlements:
Where will Fox find the next Jim Chellew to clean up this mess and restore faith with its taxpayers, patrons and parents?
To get back to the best of times, Fox needs more wisdom and no more foolishness.
