The Waynesboro School Board is going ahead with a plan to name a new superintendent by late October or early November, which, not coincidentally, would fill the job before the Nov. 3 elections for two open seats on the five-member public body.
Sounds like it might be time to initiate the proceedings for getting rid of all five of them, right?
We literally have an election coming up in three months, and we know that we’ll have at least one new member on the School Board, because the current chair, Amber Lipscomb, isn’t running for re-election.
We could very well have two new members – with Debra Freeman, running for re-election in Ward C, facing a challenger, Kelvin Washington.
But with the timeline that the School Board has set, the one or two new members will not have had a say in the hiring of the new superintendent, though they will inherit the new superintendent for the next four years.
Why the rush job? The background here is, state law only requires the School Board to have a new superintendent in place within 180 days, so, six months, of the job becoming open.
The clock, thus, doesn’t start ticking until Jan. 1, 2027 – the current superintendent, Jeffrey Cassell, announced last month his intention to retire effective Dec. 31, so, the end of the calendar year.
ICYMI
We don’t need to have a new superintendent on the job until June 30, 2027, which also happens to be the end of the 2026-2027 fiscal year – perfect timing, right?
Not to the current School Board, which wants to expedite the process, for some reason.
I mean, I get it, the why to their desire to hurry up and get this done – because this current Board has done such a wonderful job running our city school system.
Waynesboro Public Schools is, measurably, failing – the Virginia Department of Education has all four of our elementary schools, our middle school and our high school getting failing grades.
ICYMI
Despite this, the current School Board decided two years ago to give Cassell, on the job since 2013, a four-year contract extension.
And now this same School Board wants to hurry up and hire the next person, you know, because they’ve had such a good track record to this point with those kinds of decisions.
I’ll go on the record here: the School Board wants to hire from within, which we absolutely cannot allow to happen, given the state of the school system.
Being up front on the next steps: Virginia doesn’t make it easy, to say the least, to remove public officials from elected office; the deck is stacked against us by the process, which requires petition drives, a judge getting involved, and you can guess who a judge is going to side with when it comes to the people vs. the system.
That’s a shame, because if there ever was a good case for getting rid of an entire School Board, this would be the one.
Going forward, there are two ways people can get involved early in this process.
The first is filling out this survey that the School Board has put online to get feedback. The survey is open through Friday, Aug. 21.
The second: the School Board has set a public hearing for Tuesday, Aug. 18, at 6 p.m. at Waynesboro High School.
Fill out the survey, which we can doubt they’ll pay attention to, pack the School Board public hearing, which we can doubt they’ll pay heed to, and that at least gets the community on the record – that we’re not OK with continuing to pay for failing schools that are failing our kids.
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Chris Graham
