A person on the inside in leadership circles at Waynesboro Public Schools defended the controversial hire of a former love interest of the current superintendent to me this week by telling me that it’s actually the assistant superintendent who is in charge of hiring.
Unfortunately for the insiders, as a defense, all this does is reinforce the point I’ve been making the past 10 weeks, about the obvious need for change in leadership in the city school system.
Because if it actually was Ryan Barber, the assistant superintendent, who made the final sign-off on the decision to hire Kristi Williams, who was linked romantically, and quite publicly, to the current superintendent, Jeffrey Cassell, there’s a lot more rotten in Denmark than it would have been if the story they were trying to tell us was, it was the boss who did it.
ICYMI
When it was Cassell offering a job to Williams, not only a former romantic partner, but also coming off a scandalous public exit from her job as the CEO at the local United Way, which has since closed its doors, we’re talking about how this all looks on Cassell, as the head guy in the school system, using public funds to provide a soft landing spot for someone close to him.
The idea that the insider tried to sell me on this week, that it’s Barber who comes up with the lists of job hires for the School Board to vote on, up or down, that doesn’t exactly clean the slate for Cassell, in terms of the appearance of impropriety, and at the same time, it drags Barber down into the mud with Cassell.
Unless we’re going to pretend that Barber was somehow not aware that Williams had been linked to Cassell, which, come on, the central office isn’t located in a labyrinthian skyscraper, with layers of worker bees who don’t know every granular detail about each other, as is the case in our central office on Pine Avenue.
Waynesboro ain’t Mayberry, but it’s still a small enough town that everybody pretty much knows everybody else, in this context.
News flash: a public school system isn’t a family business.
You don’t just get to use public money to do a solid for somebody close to you who needs a job.
Which, OK, Cassell is retiring on Dec. 31 – not his problem anymore, right?
It’s our problem, because the Waynesboro School Board very much appears to be in a hurry to hire Barber to be the new #1 in the central office.
From the archives
- Coverage of the Waynesboro Schools superintendent search: click here.
This hire of Ms. Williams is disqualifying for Barber in either of two ways – if it was his idea entirely of his own volition, because that demonstrates awful judgment on his part, or if he put Williams’ name on the hire list at the behest of Cassell, because then he’s complicit.
I think we’re getting to a point where the School Board needs to be getting past retirements, and demanding resignations, based on what we have come to know.
Contact the Waynesboro School Board
- Debra Freeman: [email protected]
- Amber Lipscomb: [email protected]
- Erika Smith: [email protected]
- Nigel Stewart: [email protected]
- Diana Williams: [email protected]
Share
Chris Graham
