Front Page
GENEVA SCHOOL BORED?
Did this newspaper misspell the word board? Not on your life. Cauldron boil, cauldron bubble in this bifurcated stew pot of a district. Twenty teachers resigning? Stipends paid to administrators to keep them aboard? Should a school bus driver be rewarded with a better job for assaulting the entire busload of the district’s children? The school bus company was also rewarded for keeping the incident quiet by being given the contract to provide the City of Lake Geneva with a new trolley service. The ‘trolley’ vehicles will be yellow school buses? Now, come on, the school board is a long way from being the school ‘bored!’
What are stipends, and how did they come into existence inside such a well-modulated public entity? The City of Lake Geneva does not pay stipends, nor do any of the other public communities around Geneva Lake. There are no stipends paid to police officers or firefighters. The purported, and supposedly board-approved, stipends made within the school district have gone primarily to administration members. Any truth to that set of rumors? The Geneva Shore Report staff remains uncertain, but the twenty teachers bailing out is like watching the segment of Band of Brothers on HBO when the sergeants all resigned their stripes because they simply could not follow the commanding officer assigned to them.
They took one, a big one, each one of them, for the good of the others. This mass resignation is unsettling, as well as the hyper-secrecy, changing locations, and downright weird protectiveness the school board meetings have begun to evidence. Why is it that one family has inserted itself so deeply, like a dagger point, into this school district? That family, father, mother, and son, all work for, or worked for the district, yet maintain their quite successful Harry’s Restaurant, located right on Main Street. The business manager for both parts of the school district is the son. The father is some kind of part-time janitorial or hall monitor person for the schools, although he’s also rumored to be holding quite a bit of money he day-trades on behalf of the administrators. The mother finally retired from the district. What are three restaurant owners up to, and why are they so integrated into the district, like symbiotes or worse, parasites?
The meeting on Tuesday night was raucous, with Pete Wilson not wanting to state his new salary, approved by the board, but the audience yelled and muttered until he did. Peter comes in at a very nice $260,000 a year. We, at the Geneva Shore Report, wonder if the teachers, particularly those about to go down the trail of tears, like the 20 Ronin in Japan, have bad feelings about that kind of compensation package for the leader who appears to be a wonderful man but is leading the entire school district in a direction nobody has a clue as to where it is going.
