John Dick, Monroe County School Board member, joined Good Morning Keys this morning on KeysTalk 96.9/102.7FM to talk about our schools.
A new superintendent should be selected tomorrow night.
Dick said, “Tomorrow we have the school board meeting set at five o’clock, also again at Coral Shores High School. Hopefully before the evening is out, we will have selected a new superintendent. This is my second time with choosing a new superintendent, I can say that this time, we had much better applicants coming to it, and I know we’re going to wind up with a very good superintendent. There will be a discussion. Because as board members, on anything we’re going to vote on, we can’t discuss unless it’s in an open meeting. I could sense some feeling from some board members. I think you could see how they ask questions and talk to people. But again, we’re going to come up with a good superintendent, because we have a good group of four. I picked four from the start. That’s all I did. And I stayed with the same four when we got to semi finalists, and then to finalists, I just kept saying the same four and quite frankly, three of my four are in the final four. So it was easy to see who was shining above the others all along. We’ve got some real good choices, good choices from internal and good choices from external. So we can’t go wrong on this one.”
The board also took the public thoughts into consideration.
Dick said, “They didn’t put their name to it, but there was a lot. Some of them were very, very thoughtful, and they discussed why they thought somebody was good, and then they had a little thought about, well, is this going to be okay? Of course, you’ve got the back and forth on internal and external. There’s good reasons to go in either direction on those type of things. To me, we’re going to look at all the factors, and I’m sure the board will pick the best candidate for this job and to move this district forward.”
Graduation is upon us.
Dick said, “It starts with the Take Stock graduation, which is on the 17th and they hold that in Marathon. Then on the 28th, we do Coral Shores on the evening, on the 29th, Marathon and then on the 30th, we do Key West High School. So we do the three high schools, three nights in a row.”
Enrollment in the district has grown.
Dick said, “It’s grown a little bit this year. We were on a long term, slow downhill, and then the last few years, it started to pick up a little bit and increasing. That’s good for us, increasing in the students. I think all of Florida has started to increase. But, it comes in waves. I think a lot of it has to do with the hurricanes and all that. After you get a bunch of hurricanes, people get a little nervous and they leave, and I know that was part of the exodus for us. There was a couple of years way back when we had a bunch of hurricanes, and some of them, it was the scares. People had to leave four or five times one year, and actually none of the storms hit, but they had exodus, and it’s an expense for people.”
Could there be cutbacks in funding from the state?
Dick said, “We knew it was going to come. I’m very glad that we have kept up on our fund balance over the last few years, because having been to this before, there’s always going to be the next cutback in funding. I remember, when I first got on the board, some of the people in the administration thought that tax revenues would never decline, and boy, were they in for a big surprise. We had to reduce our spending by about 15% over a two year period, which was a big deal and caused a lot of hard feelings. But, I mean, I told them ahead of time, I said, you’ve got to prepare for this. It’s coming. We should be able to weather this, but I think we need to do some reductions in some areas in the school district. I’ve always pushed do the reductions when you have the end of the year, when people leave on their own. People leave, they retire, and now reduce your staff by moving people into these open positions instead of laying off and firing. If you do that, when you see these time periods coming where you’re going to be in declining revenues, prepare for it by doing that, moving people into open seats instead of laying them off. When you don’t do it, and all of a sudden you get hit with a big loss, then you have to do reductions. Quite frankly, you reduce people here in this community, say, a teacher, and you have to lay off a teacher, there’s really not that many jobs that teacher could go and get. They wind up having to move out. That’s a big deal. If you’re in Miami, you can get a job somewhere else and do something else. There’s not much here in the Keys that you can do other than that.”