Bradenton Times News Articles

Following three interim superintendents, Mr. Rick Mills will soon take the reins as superintendent of the Manatee County School Board. Lieutenant Colonel Mills must be made of good stuff. During my Army hitch as an enlisted man in 1961-63, I recall how few fellow enlistees were even considered for Officer’s Candidate School, and not a single one who was tabbed for West Point. Consider the following an open letter to Mr. Mills, which poses many key questions he will face in the daunting assignment of breathing life into our district.

Rick Mills was not the easiest choice the Manatee County School Board could have made in selecting a new superintendent. A retired Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army who has spent the last 12 years building an impressive resume helping to turn around public schools in Chicago and Minneapolis, Mills is not your typical school administrator, either on paper or in person. However, he was the candidate who had demonstrated the best skill set to tackle the considerable problems the district now faces. Kudos to the members of the board for making the first of what could be many difficult decisions to get Manatee Schools back on track.

President Obama's push to hike the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour has renewed debate about the role of regulation when it comes to human capital in an economy. Companies clearly want to pay as little as the market for labor will allow; however, there is no denying that a variety of factors have conspired to see that the wages of most workers have been flat for going on a half century, or that it's been bad for our economy as a whole.

The county commission's most recent concession to the Mosaic Company demonstrates just how good the phosphate giant has it here in Manatee. If it can't quite push through everything it wants when applying for a major expansion, like the one it received permission for last June, it can just come back later and collect it piecemeal, the way developers have been doing for years. All the two interests have to do is make sure the dais remains full of friendly faces.

Once again, the Florida legislature is hard at work trying to dismantle one of the last solid middle-class pension systems to be found. Despite a wealth of real problems it seems determined to ignore, it has quickly found time to once more take up the issue of trying to scrap a successful anti-poverty tool, in favor of a system that would transfer princely sums to Wall Street, while hanging hard working teachers, law enforcement officers and state and municipal workers out to dry.

For two days this week, the Manatee School Board conducted extensive interviews, hoping to fill the vacancy for the district's next superintendent. The process included six candidates who were chosen from the 29 applicants seeking the position. All told, there were about 14 hours of rapid-fire group and one-on-one interviews, a grueling format that allowed each prospect to display grace under fire. Nonetheless, the most challenging part lies ahead: deciding who will become the new captain of a ship that has drifted woefully off course.

Lance Armstrong won many cycling races, but now those wins have been stripped away. Armstrong fought off the accusations for years but now admits the wins violated the rules of the sport which made him an icon. The United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), which oversees anti-doping programs for U.S. Olympic, Paralympic, Pan-American and ParaPan American sport, has gone so far as to strip away those wins, while sponsors withdrew their support for this famous, larger than life cycling icon. We can only wish our political system would have a similar system of stripping those who win at any cost, including misrepresentations, violating laws and political corruption.

Americans seem to love feigning shock any time we are “betrayed” by those we worship, and the media is always willing to sensationalize a story that offers elements of corruption and deceit. But from Lance Armstrong to Major League Baseball to the crooks on Wall Street who nearly took down the global economy, evidence abounds that we live in a culture of cheating where the rewards for skirting the rules vastly outweigh the punishments for getting caught. It’s time to stop blaming the people we enable and take a look at our collective role in creating such an unethical society.

It appears that there is now clear evidence of what everyone who followed the once-in-a-decade state legislative redistricting process already knew: despite a new constitutional amendment forbidding legislators from basing boundaries on political calculations, that is exactly what they did. What’s more, the audaciously brazen manner in which they disregarded the will of their constituents demonstrates a complete disregard for the democratic process that must be meaningfully corrected.

I am starting to feel like there may be light at the end of the tunnel for our mess with the Manatee County educational system. The so-called accounting expert of a superintendent was allowed to resign (he should have been fired with all he messed up). The superintendent's support system will soon be retired. We have three School Board members now who question what is being presented. I have seen in the past where items were voted to pass 3 to 2 in the opposite direction of what was needed. Items were passed that were incomplete, that didn't have adequate time to evaluate and etc.