Editor's Note:  This is a reprinted article of something I wrote back in March....I think it deserves another look.

At the risk of sounding like a Cold War conspirist of the 50's or 60's,  I have to admit that this reeks of a Communist take over of our schools.   According to the above news report,

In July 2011, a petition with more than 4,000 signatures was presented to the Australian New South Wales (NSW) senate.  It requested to cancel Confucius courses in seven schools.  The petition read "CI is controlled by the CCP's (Chinese Communist Party) Education Department directly.  It is not allowed to discuss the Tiananmen Massacre, Tibet, human rights in China, Taiwan, Falun Dafa and other sensitive topics."  And this is what Dr. Dallemand wants taught in our schools.  Basically what this means is that a foreign country will have the final word on what is taught in Bibb County.  If you don't believe me, ask Robert Davis director of the Confucius Institute for the Chicago Public School System who says, the "Confucius Institutes have total autonomy in their course materials and teachers."   Get mad as hell Middle Georgia!

Below is an Opinion piece written by Jane Drennan in the September 26, 2010 issue of the Rochester Post Bulletin.  Please note the fingerpointing at Board Members Chris Fischer and Sandy Soltis.  This sounds like a very recurring theme for Dallemand and his Dream Team.


Opinions

Racial incidents in school district can no longer be ignored

Posted: Sep 26, 2010, 8:37 pm
Jane Drennan
"For the past three years the leadership of the Rochester public schools has been studying systemic racism and its impact on the education of our children. This was implemented as a part of the District Five Year Plan introduced by Dr. Romain Dallemand shortly after he became superintendent.

This document is easily accessible on the Rochester public schools website. In that process all district leaders have individually examined their own racial identity. I have learned that as a white person I have many privileges that people of color are denied. As a white person I have a responsibility to recognize and stand up to racism when I see it hurting people of color, especially the children. As a white person I need to engage in conversations about race without permitting sabotage and stay focused on the topic of race. The increase of racial incidents within our school system can no longer be ignored while our colleagues, friends, neighbors, and students of color are treated differently and unjustly.

In a Sept.18, Post-Bulletin news story, it was stated that a district employee broke protocol while presenting a newly hired administrator to the school board. Former board member Cris Fischer indicated that “if we had better processes in place, a lot of these situations could be avoided.”

Ms. Fischer’s perspective is interesting, coming from a long-time board member and school volunteer who has considerable experience with district policies, procedures, and protocol.

The district has followed the same hiring process for years and during the summer of 2010, eight administrative positions were filled using that process, including the one that created an “awkward situation” at the Sept. 14 school board meeting.

The protocol for the board is to honor the process and congratulate the candidate once the hiring is completed, which was followed for seven of the eight candidates this summer. Instead of honoring this candidate, School board member Dr. Sandra Soltis brought up the issue of a hiring freeze of this interim position. Prior to that moment the board had not indicated an interest in pursuing further budget cuts for the 2010-2011 school year. That requires a process that is also in place.

So the situation created by Dr. Soltis was the ongoing divide and distract tactic that has consistently stalled progress for this board and the school district for the past three years. In the same Sept. 18 news story, Ms. Fischer inadvertently omitted these facts in order to once again place blame on the school administration by talking about processes that she knows full well have been past practice. This appeared to me to be a carefully designed tactic to undermine the real issue that surrounded the hiring of this candidate who is a person of color.
So who broke protocol? From the tape of the Sept. 14 meeting, I would suggest that Dr. Soltis “broke protocol." Although Ms. Fischer claims this “awkward situation” had nothing to do with her resignation from the board, perhaps she realized that she had crossed the line of racial tension in our district that would no longer be tolerated.

Three years ago, Dr. Dallemand invited staff to participate in planning the Strategic Five Year Plan that includes a goal to “recruit staff to make the RPS administrative, teaching, and support staff reflect the changing community and composition of the student population.” The district has diligently pursued opportunities to hire staff of color as a strategy to close the gap. This is a divergence from Ms. Fischer’s “reservations about long range-planning, organizational management, and open and honest communication.” See the complete plan online at www @rochester.k12.mn.us

The real anguish of this meeting was for the person who was invited to be honored by the school board in order to celebrate joining a great school district! Instead, he stood while his position was discussed as if he didn’t even exist.

At a recent district leadership meeting, we reflected on our introduction to the board after being hired. The only people who could say they weren’t celebrated were some of our recent hires who happen to be people of color. This is shameful coming from a board who speaks publicly about the urgency of hiring people of color but continues to sabotage these efforts by questioning the process, questioning a person’s credentials, questioning the person's educational experience, or the most recent — the option to freeze the position.

All adults teach the children and as an educator in the Rochester Public Schools for over 20 years, I assure you the children are watching. The topic is race and we need to stay focused on it, recognize racism and speak out against it. This is a moral obligation we share for the sake of our children and our community."
 
Now we need to take a look at the resignation of Cris Fisher as reported by the Post Bulletin on September 15, 2010,  as Fisher finally threw her hands up in surrender after several years of trying to fight the Dallemand Juggernaut:

Local News

Decision to resign reflects concerns about leadership
Posted: Sep 15, 2010, 9:37 pm

Matt Russell

"Cris Fischer was chairwoman of the Rochester School Board on April 18, 2007, when the board voted to hire Romain Dallemand of Hartford, Conn., as superintendent. 

Fischer, who suddenly left the board last week because she said she can no longer support the district's leadership, favored another candidate, Michael Ludwell of Manchester, N.H.

Fischer publicly supported the board's decision to hire Dallemand, however, calling to congratulate him and welcome him to the district.

"We had a great conversation," she said at the time. "He is very excited about coming here and he's well aware of the fact that we are 100 percent in support of his superintendency and coming to Rochester."

Changes that apparently contributed to Fischer's resignation are reflected in critical public comments she made about Dallemand's leadership. She and other board members have openly acknowledged ongoing internal conflicts that reflected the original 4-3 split when Dallemand was hired.

In May 2009, Fischer and two other board members who favored Ludwell, Diane M.H. Blakley and Sandra Soltis, did not attend a board meeting in protest of an administrative hire the board was making. Fischer, Soltis, and Blakley all said they didn't attend because they believed they couldn't ask critical questions about a hiring.

By August 2009, Fischer, Soltis and Blakley supported only a one-year extension of Dallemand's contract while other board members supported a three-year extension.

Fischer, who spent 20 years as a parent volunteer in the district before joining the board in 2001, praised Dallemand's five-year plan for raising student achievement. But she criticized how the plan has been implemented, saying teachers had not been brought into the process. The lack of leadership had divided the board and the district, she said.

"I have always wanted to make this work, but there are some areas that have come up in the last six months that I cannot ignore," she said at the time.

After the board's vote on Aug. 19, 2009, in favor of a three-year contract extension for Dallemand, she said this week, she considered resigning because she questioned whether she could support the decision.

Through a district spokeswoman, Dallemand declined a request to be interviewed for this story.

E-mail controversy

While Fischer says there is no single event that pushed her to resign from the board, she acknowledges that a dispute on the board over an e-mail she sent last December showed her how difficult internal rifts would be to heal.

The controversy started after Fischer e-mailed board members outlining a process that she thought should be followed to install Jim Pittenger as board chairman. Fischer was vice-chairwoman at the time and by custom would have been expected to be selected to be the board's next chair.

"I feel it is crucial that we have a 7-0 vote for board chair for next year," she wrote in the Dec. 19 e-mail, adding that "it would be best to have someone nominate me and I will decline for professional reasons (which is true as I am pursuing other goals)."

Board member Fred Daly cried foul, saying Fischer had violated the board's code of ethics in seeking to orchestrate the vote.

Fischer apologized publicly in an emotional statement. She admits today, as she did then, that she made a big mistake, albeit with good intentions.

"I just felt that it would be good to start off the new year united," she said this week.

As a result of the e-mail dispute, Fischer said she realized how hard it would be to bring unity to the board.

"There was a piece of that," she said. "Again, it (her resignation) is the personal decision of whether this is something that I can continue to do when there are so many internal conflicts."

Other developments had little impact

Fischer acknowledges that former district finance director Cheryl Coryea brought concerns about Dallemand to her shortly before Dallemand fired Coryea, for example, but added that "I can honestly say that it had absolutely nothing to do with any thought process I had at that point."

The concerns Coryea expressed to the then board-chairwoman were related to allegations Coryea was making about Dallemand storing a custom-made glass desk off school district grounds and failure to document significant charges for meals at meetings, according to court documents related to a whistleblower claim Coryea has brought against the district.

"I don't get into rumors that are out there and any of those things that happen," Fischer said. "I'm just not going to get pulled into any of that."

Fischer also gave little weight to the fact that Blakley and Soltis, the two board members who voted with her against Dallemand's three-year contract extension, both decided not to run for re-election in November.

"It was not really a factor at all" in her wanting to leave, she said.

Also not a factor, she said, was the fact that as vice-chairwoman, she would once again have been in the middle of discussions about who would chair the board in 2011.

'We're kind of scrambling'

Looking back, Fischer said the reservations she expressed about Dallemand's three-year contract extension in 2009 were related to concerns she still has today: long-range planning, organizational management, and open and honest communication.

"Some of the budget proposals in the first round of budget cuts we did, and the way that the proposals came forward to us I felt were very last-minute," she said. "I felt that they were ones that would be impossible to implement in the time period that we had."

She said that she's had similar frustrations with the planning process for the current referendum, as well as a recently started budget-reduction process.

"We need to start earlier — we're kind of scrambling, and that's not a good feeling," she said. "We're not getting the information to the public in the way that we need to get it to the public because of the fact that we're just not planning ahead and planning soon enough for these types of decisions."

Fischer said she still wants to be involved as an education supporter in Rochester, but doesn't feel she can be effective serving on the board as it is being operated in conjunction with district leadership.

"I just don't feel like I'm able to get anything done," she said. "I feel like I've tried to work within the current system as it is set up under our present leadership, under our present superintendent, and I'm just not able to. You can only do that for so long and then decide, 'Is this the best way for me to serve?'"

She isn't willing to call it a straw that broke the camel's back, but Fischer acknowledged that an awkward situation during the recent hiring of an assistant principal is emblematic of her concerns about how the district is run.

Because the human resources director was not at the Sept. 7 meeting, another employee who was filling in broke protocol and brought the assistant principal candidate to stand in front of the board before the vote on his hire was made. As a result, the candidate had to stand there while Soltis questioned whether the position should be frozen because of enrollment declines at the school and district budget issues.

The fact that this situation unfolded as it did shows that the board needs opportunities to discuss such decisions sooner in the process, she said.

"It was a very painful and awkward situation for everyone," she said. "If we had better processes in place, I think a lot of these situations could be avoided."

Looking to stay involved

While Fischer has been critical of Dallemand, she stresses that she's just expressing the opinions of one former board member and that she wants him to succeed. He's brought some great ideas to the district, she said, but it's the implementation of those plans that concerns her.

Board member Blakley, who praised Fischer as a board member, said Fischer's resignation wasn't a big surprise.

 "I think there's been a level of frustration for a while," she said. "I think she was just getting really tired."

Daly, who had accused Fischer of violating the board's ethics policy, declined comment. "I'm not going to say that for publication," he said when asked his thoughts on her as board member.

Board member Breanna Bly, who was on opposite sides of Fischer regarding Dallemand's contract,  said they agreed 99 percent of the time during their nearly 10 years together on the board, and she considers Fischer a close friend.

"We've had discussions over the years, and my understanding is that she's leaving for personal reasons, and that's good enough for me," Bly said."


Beside the obvious parallels that are there between the situation in Rochester with Soltis and Fisher and our situation with Bechtel and Sipe, I really want you to pay attention to the paragaph in the Fisher story:
 
"Looking back, Fischer said the reservations she expressed about Dallemand's three-year contract extension in 2009 were related to concerns she still has today: long-range planning, organizational management, and open and honest communication."

Sounding familiar gang?  This leopard will not be changing his spots.  Not now...Not 3 years from now...Not ever.

During his latest infomercial pumping up the Macon Miracle, Bibb County School Superintendent Romain Dallemand told a crowd at the Macon Rotary Club that he had 'always decided' to pay for his trip to Belgium, and said that local reporters who brought it out, that would be me,  are 'creating sensationalism'.  No doctor....We are  holding you accountable like Cheryl Coryea did when you bought a $5000 desk in Rochester then hid it off of the school district's property.  The difference is you can't fire me.  Too bad.,...I'd nail you for $300,000 too, like she did when she settled out of court. 

You sir are covering your arse and no one except for your toadies are falling for it.  If you planned on paying for it all along, why didn't you just say so to begin with? 

Thanks to WeArePolitics own Scott Serafy for showing us just how Dr. Dallemand is really using our money.

I'd like to thank a 'Curious' reader of WeArePolitics for introducing me to a man who very well could have been separated at birth from Bibb County Superintendent of Schools Romain Dallemand:  Dr. Charles Hopson, formerly of the Pulaski County Arkansas Special School District, which is right outside of Little Rock.

See if any of these things sound familiar:

Hopson was hired into the school system in July, 2010 coming with very little experience.  (He actually has a bit more than the dear doctor serving as a Middle School Principal for eight years, a High School Principal for five years and a year in administrative roles, all in the Portland, Oregon School System. 

"Hitting the ground running", Hopson introduced the district to Glenn Singleton's methods employed in "Courageous Conversation".  (See these letters of referral.)

In another ground-breaking move, Hopson introduced the Confucius Institute to the district and announced that Mandarin Chinese will be taught.

A local reporter files a complaint against Dr. Hopson for failure to release information.  It's apparent something is being hidden.

A legislative Joint Auditing Team recommends "that the state remove the school board out of frustration that officials have not adequately addressed long-standing audit findings and that the district chronically lacks sufficient internal controls to properly manage its finances."  (See link above.)

A Whistleblower, June Elliott, files suit against Dr. Hopson, claiming irregular hiring practices.

June 20, 2011, the Arkansas Board of Education abolishes and disolves the Pulaski County Special School District and fires Hopson because of irregularities in audits and accounting practices.

Hopson in return files a $500,000 suit against the District.
 
So....Any of this sounding familiar?  Will this be the future of the Bibb County Board of Education and Dr. Dallemand?  It took a little over a year in Arkansas...How long will it take in Macon?

I just recieved confirmation from the Bibb Coutny BOE  that Bibb County School Superintendent Romain Dallemand is in Belleview, Michigan.   Dallemand is part of a five-member team that is part of a meeting called a "District Qar Visit".  Qar means Quality Review Team and will be making recommendations on how to improve the Van Buren School District located in Belleview. 

As I understand it, this is a professional courtesy extended and not a mandatory trip, and while I agree that our local leaders should exhibit a 'team player' attitude with other districts, I ask should we not get our own house in order first?  If it were only this trip, I'd be patting Dr. Dallemand on the back.  But add this to the various other trips he's made since his hiring, and I'd say it's very unneccesary at this point.   

I quite honestly don't know how Dr. Dallemand will be able to adjust to such primitive conditions.  In the news article below from The Belleville Independent, it states:

"They’ll eat in their hotel and Kullis (Special Services Supervisor Diane Kullis)  has prepared carryout menus from local restaurants, so they can order and school representatives can pick up and bring the meals to the hotel. The team will continue working into the evening and start again early on Tuesday. They will split up in order to visit six different schools."

Please see the link here that explains what he will be doing: http://www.thebellevilleindependent.com/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=524

WeArePolitics has learned through  unconfirmed yet highly reliable sources, that Bibb County School Superintendent is gaining some more frequent flyer miles and is traveling outside the district yet again.  I've attemtped to contact the school district through email and phone call and have not received a confirmation nor denial yet.

As you all remember, Dr. Dallemand just returned from a trip to Ghent, Belgium.  Ok...He paid for that himself after the stink raised by taxpayers after WeArePolitics uncovered his plans.  Where in the world can he be off to this time???    I will certainly let you know when this is confirmed and where the good doctor has traveled to this time.  

It was just confirmed to me that there is in fact a brand new Macon Miracle plan that is already being implemented within the Bibb County School System.  The first day of implementation was yesterday during the "Teacher's Planning Day".  The details are very sketchy at this point, but I can confirm that on page 27 of the plan it states:

Action Step 2:

"Provide opportunites for teachers and administrators to conduct informal peer observations of classrooms using data recording devices." (Emphasis added.)

Read between the lines people!  This flatly states that teachers and administrators will have the authority to SPY on their peers, and it is sanctioned by the Superintendent of Schools! 

In the past I have with tongue firmly planted on cheek, called Dr. Dallemand "Papa Doc", as a lot of people do in the system as well as they did in Rochester, but now the comparisons to former Haitian President François Duvalier are becoming more and more real if you compare his dictatorial powers.  (Duvalier was elected in a rigged election and kept his power intact by intimidation and changing the Constitution of Haiti to make him 'President For Life', a title he kept until his death in 1971.)  Our friend Dr. Dallemand is now running our school system in much of the same way. 

As a result of several complaints, WeArePolitics being the first, to Attorney General Sam Olens' office about late and missing Open Records requests, the Macon Telegraph is reporting that on May 2nd the Attorney General's office will have representatives in Macon to hold a forum to discuss the to go over the Open Records laws.

As I have shown on several occassions, the last being information withheld about Dr. Dallemand's trip to Belgium, the Bibb BOE has done just about everything possible to stonewall Open Records requests.  In fairness to Randy H0ward, the attorney for the Bibb BOE, he has been a lot more responsive to my requests since he received a letter from the Attorney General saying that they would act as mediators in my behalf.   Folks, this is a monumental first step in getting this entire school system investigated!

Please read the Telegraph story here and PLEASE show up at the May 2nd event:
http://www.macon.com/2012/04/27/2005839/complaints-about-bibb-county-school.html#storylink=rss#wgt=rss

The Great Belgium Waffle....Much Ado About Nothing....Diddly-squat.....Nada....Zilch....or my personal favorite, Bupkis mit Kuduchas....(Google the definition...)...All of these sayings could be the title of the presentation that Dr. Romain Dallemand and his traveling band will be giving in Ghent on the 27th rather than the actual title:  "The Macon Miracle: Connecting Strengths, Reinventing Education, Helping Children Flourish".
Let's look at the myths that have been presented about this trip:

MYTH#1:  The presentation given by Dr. Dallemand and company is more about the 'summit' meetings and grand rollout give at the Macon Centreplex than the actual plan itself.

REALITY:  See the email below where the arrow points...The World Appreciative Inquiry Conference has asked that this be more about the 'positive education' than that of the 'aspects of the summit.'  The Conference is less concerned about the pomp and circumstance and more about the substance....

MYTH#2:  The Bibb County Board of Education was 'invited' to attend the 2012 WAIC.

REALITY:  The group led by Kathy Becker called The Center for Appreciative Inquiry took it upon themselves to apply for this boondoggle.  It took several emails and over a week for anyone from the Bibb BOE to even respond to them.  See the emails again...

MYTH#3:  The cost of the Belgium trip will only be about $3000 per person or a total of $9000.

REALITY:  The cost will most likely be closer to $5000 per person.  See the breakdown here.

MYTH #4:  The biggest myth of this complete waste of taxpayers money is the fact that this will actually help students in the Bibb County School System.  I have to ask if this was such a high honor, why didn't Dr. Dallemand have a press conference touting this when it was learned that he would be going?  If this was such a high honor, why was it denied by the attorney for the Bibb BOE that a trip was even scheduled, but only 'talked about'?   Why did it take two open records request and actually finding out through a third party source that Dallemand, Griffin-Zeibart and Godfrey were even going?

REALITY:  This is only a resume' builder for the good doctor who has shown he has the transparancy of a bag of manure....