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THE ‘STIPE’ HUNT

When the author of this article was a boy in Hawaii and a Boy Scout, he camped at Bellows Air Force Base Beach with a troop of other boys and Mr. Torres, the scout leader of the time. On the first night, Mr. Torres organized a snipe hunt for the new kids who had recently joined the troop.

A snipe was ornately described as a flightless bird, like a very small Emu or ostrich. Nets were given to the four new boys, and off Mr. Torres went, and they went. Hours later, they returned to rejoin the others, wet, sandy, tired, and pretty miserable, as Mr. Torres led a pretty mean hike. The joke was then revealed, to the deep embarrassment of the new kids, including this author, as they were made fun of in depth and with some great humiliating pain.

There existed no snipes, of course, although snipe hunts are probably still conducted in some places to make fools of the new guys, gals, or kids. After a while, Mr. Torres went to the showers to get ready to return to his private tent and sleep. Somehow and at some time while he was gone, one of the boys accidentally kicked over a can of kerosene Mr. Torres kept by to help ignite cooking and evening fires in the humid air so close to the breaking surf.

Somehow, the kerosene ignited. Before Mr. Torres made it back, running nearly naked and still wet, his tent was aflame with all of his things inside. No culprit was ever found, and no boy ever came forth to admit to being the one who inadvertently burned down Mr. Torres’ tent. Mr. Torres, unlike how he’d responded to the humiliation of the new kids with respect to the snipe hunt results, did not think the burning of his tent was funny. He also never returned to camp with our troop again, nor were there ever any more snipe hunts, as far as I knew.

The made-up word ‘Stipe’ is, of course, to be used in place of Snipe. There is a Stipe hunt on; that word, if fully written out, is stipend. A bonus, if you will. One rumored to be paid to administrators and not teachers or other employees. Stipends or bonuses can be given out with the school board’s approval to those they feel have a need, a cause, a contribution, or whatever, as there is no formal guidance for what actions or results merit one.

Currently, there is a hunt for these stipends that have been given out over the past four years, if any have really been given out. Is this a ‘Stipe Hunt,’ and if it is, then are the stipends real or imaginary, and who, even if they are imaginary, are the characters playing the new Boy Scouts, and who is playing Mr. Torres, symbolically if not in reality?

Peter Wilson is a direct target of this real or imagined criticism. Peter Wilson is the school’s superintendent and a seemingly very principled and good man. Those are hard to find these days, and the schools don’t need to lose him without cause or because of being the object of a Stipe Hunt, unless he has knowledge or actions in awarding stipends not authorized by the board. The financial director of the schools, a man of truly monumentally huge questionable material, is requesting that the schools create another referendum request because the schools need more operational capital. Is that Congruent with the issuing of stipends?

Should bonus payments be made to anybody on staff or in the administration if the budget does not support it? The Lake Geneva School District is split into two organizations. One meeting is on Monday night and the other on Tuesday night. The results of the Stipe Hunt should be in so that the GSR can run the results and conclusions in this issue.

Congruent with the issuing of stipends? Should bonus payments be made to anybody on staff or in the administration if the budget does not support it?   The first meeting was without incident, but the Tuesday meeting had the re-vote for Peter Wilson’s salary increase, which was denied earlier. By a three-to-two vote, he got his pay raise of around 30,000 a year.

The stipends remain a mystery as to who got one, how much they were, and what board members might have signed off on them to make them legal. And never forget, the Stipe Hunt is still on, and the GSR looks forward, quite possibly, to more humiliation even though there’s no tent to burn down.