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.