I left the following comment on the most recent blog post of Dr. Romain Dallemand. It is currently awaiting moderation.

Dr. Dallemand,

I am part of the Macon community that has attempted to make it “very plain” that your “Macon Miracle” plan has many substantive problems that are profoundly troubling to me as an educated and involved parent. It is desperately in need of “revisions, additions, and deletions,” as you say; and, your assurances to the contrary, I am not convinced that you intended the plan as it now exists to be the beginning of a conversation but rather its end.

If the plan being unveiled today were merely “a good start for us,” then why the fanfare? I fail to see the logic of balloons, confetti, and acrobats (!) to announce that you and the Board have put an opening bid on the table. And if this is how you roll out a proposal for extended discussion, then I can only imagine how much of the taxpayers’ money you intend to waste when the final product is unveiled.

If the plan were merely “a good start,” then why avoid meeting with Tanner Pruitt and Brett Felty when they arrived at your office—along with some two hundred of their classmates—to express their concerns about what was in the plan? Surely you knew they were coming and had ample time to clear your morning schedule. At the least, a brief meeting with concerned students would have signaled a willingness to listen to all the stakeholders. It may well have earned you some much-needed goodwill from people like me.

If you intended this plan to begin a conversation about what needs to change in the Bibb County School District, and I do not dispute for a moment that substantive changes must be made, then how did you and the Board manage to miscommunicate your intentions so utterly that large numbers of Bibb County residents were under the impression that there was going to be a vote on accepting the plan today? Could it possibly be because the original plan was to vote on the Macon Miracle at today’s “unveiling” event—as WMAZ and other news outlets have reported?  If the vote was merely to put the plan on the table—not to ratify it as official policy— it would seem an able leader and communicator should have been able to explain this quickly and clearly and thus avoid the potential embarrassment of having to back-pedal on voting at all.

Don’t get me wrong, Dr. Dallemand. I am not necessarily opposed to every detail of your plan. But in my estimation the negatives far outweigh the positives, and even where I agree in principle (foreign language learning, year-round school), I have grave misgivings about the proposed implementation. Far more worrying than your proposals, however, I am deeply concerned about the heavy-handed manner in which they are being advanced. If I may be blunt, you have not assured me that your talk about openness to “revisions, additions, and deletions” is anything more than a last-minute damage control maneuver.

I will watch with interest how you and the Board proceed in the weeks to come. An attitude of transparency and humility would be a refreshing change, and a good start to a more fruitful and healthy relationship with the people who pay your salary.

Regards,

Darrell J. Pursiful, Ph.D.

Dispatched today to William Thomas Barnes III, President of the Bibb County School Board:

Mr. Barnes,

My parents were teachers at a public high school in the inner city of Detroit. They could tell you stories about incompetent teachers, school-board politics, disengaged parents, and unprepared students that would make your toes curl. And yet, they inculcated in me a deep appreciation for public schools. I am a product of a public school education, and it never entered my mind to send my child to a private school—until we moved to Macon.

It was with profound displeasure that I learned last week that Dr. Dallemand’s plan to revitalize the Bibb County School system involved closing schools and eliminating teachers. I cannot fathom how this will result in anything other than larger class sizes, less individualized attention to students, and further academic decline.

I am, furthermore, mystified at the idea of shifting fourth- and fifth-graders into middle school and what were once middle-schoolers into high school.

What leaves me most stupefied is that Dr. Dallemand is unable to answer legitimate questions about how much his so-called “miracle” will cost in the short term. It is simple due diligence to know what the plan is likely to cost and make that information available.

While I agree that we must do something for the good of Bibb County Public Schools, we don’t have to do this! A bad idea doesn’t become a good one just because we have to do “something.” Dr. Dallemand is asking for the largest and most radical change in the history of Bibb County Schools since integration, and he is asking for this change to be approved after only seven days of consideration. At the very least, one would have thought he would take the time to sell his plan to the stakeholders—the parents—rather than ramrodding it through the board. That is what leaders do when they have a grand vision. Only the insecure try to rush a decision before all the details are known and explored.

Among some of my closest friends—who represent a wide array of political perspectives but who all possess advanced degrees in their fields and are more than knowledgeable and involved in their children’s education—I am not aware of any who support this morass of a plan.

Rest assured, I will be looking very carefully into private school options for my child should the school board fail to apply the brakes to Dr. Dallemand’s half-baked agenda. The board may be willing to experiment on my child, but I do not have to like it, and I certainly do not have to stand for it.

Regards,

Darrell J. Pursiful, Ph. D.

UPDATE: Just learned about the petition at Change.org: “Stop the ‘Macon Miracle’ Plan.”