Spending $26K on a speaker who runs a private school isn’t going to motivate FCPS teachers | Opinion
If Fayette County school officials want to motivate their employees, they could find the money to erase recent cuts of aides and art and music teachers.
If they wanted to motivate their employees, they could give them raises.
If they wanted to motivate their employees, they would explain EXACTLY how money is spent at every level so both they and parents can understand why we are seeing cuts all around.
Instead, we find out from our reporting partner WKYT and Herald-Leader reporter Valarie Honeycutt Spears that Fayette officials think they will motivate their employees by paying $26,000 to Ron Clark, a motivational speaker and Survivor contestant who runs a private school in Atlanta.
As former principal and school board candidate Betsy Rutherford told Spears: “Teachers want to be in their classrooms preparing for the students and not spend this time at a big convocation listening to someone telling them what to do when they have a major to-do list to complete. They need this money to achieve the to-do list for their students.”
Now $26,000 is a droplet in the $800 million ocean of the Fayette school budget. But it’s demoralizing when leaders make such strange and random decisions.
I understand it must be extremely frustrating for Superintendent Demetrus Liggins and the school board to sit in hour after hour of boring meetings about policy and have the only news to emerge be about a $26,000 motivational speaker or a $6.6. million land deal.
For what it’s worth, I think it’s smart for the school system to buy land early and often because they’ll save money for land they will need before too long.
But they must stop with these weird distractions, like changing Liggins’ contract to pay $25,000 for life coaching, a change they tried to hide from reporters, or $100,000 convocation ceremonies, or $80,000 for “rebranding” costs we only found out about after the Attorney General zinged them for an open records violations.
You know what they say, $25,000 here, $80,000 there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.
Instead, hold an event where you tell us exactly how many administrators are working for Central Office compared to pre-pandemic.
Tell us how you can afford all these new buildings.
Tell us why — like we are 5 years old — why the second-largest district in the state can’t have all the art and music programming it needs. Let your budget folks talk directly to reporters so they can better understand what’s going on.
There are larger stakes, too.
Amendment 2 on the ballot this fall would divert public school funding to private schools. Every time school officials do something that seems random and frivolous, they are telling the public they should not be trusted with our tax dollars. If you think public schools are strapped now, just wait till they’re funding private schools.
People in Lexington support public education. They love their schools and they want to love them even more. They want teachers and staff to be properly paid and happy so they can do their best at educating our children.
Motivate all of us with total transparency and better decisions. Please.
