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PARENTS WANT A LEADER, NOT A PETER
Smooth sailing for Peter Wilson, Lake Geneva’s school superintendent, has come to an end. How worry, work, and then an overwhelming effort to get a referendum passed that would keep all the city’s schools, and then some, open if the U.S. Department of Education were cancelled and wiped out by the current administration. The value of education and the advance of science have come to be subjects unwelcome to this nation’s current administration and many of the MAGA followers.
The man has done some good work, but the follow-up to that good work is to apply the money and acumen to make the students and parents happy and better educated, and to do so while representing the school district by more than verbal presentations. What’s happened that’s generated this article in the Geneva Shore Report?
How about no real accounting for the money that came in through the referendum? Not that it’s disappeared, but why has there been no real mass accounting, so everyone gets to know, and why has none of that money flowed down to the teachers in the form of income, expenses, and benefits? Why are a dozen teachers from the K through 8 grades resigning at the end of this school year? That’s almost ten percent of the entire teacher employment rolls in the district, so it’s a big deal. There’s also the school bus incident that took place a few weeks ago. One of the private school bus company’s employees was driving K through 8 students when one of the students refused to sit down.
It’s been argued for years that school buses should require seat belts and their use, but that is still not true today. What the woman driver threatened to do (using foul language) if the student wouldn’t sit down was to hard-break the bus. When the student failed to comply, the driver slammed on the brakes at about thirty miles per hour. The stop was so sudden and harsh that the students were all thrown from their seats. Some had damage to their belongings, but no real injuries were reported. The incident was reported to the police, but the driver refused to be interviewed, and the police did not refer charges or arrest her. The school trip was being recorded by the district, so the police went there to get the video footage. They were given footage, but the incident was blanked from the video. They had to go back and demand the missing footage, which they were then given. The school board was not informed of this incident, and neither were the parents of the students, other than by the stories their kids told them about it.
Finally, as this article is written, the woman is still driving regularly, picking up and delivering students, just as before. What does this have to do with Peter Wilson, the esteemed and pretty well proven executive of the district? Just about everything. Peter also approved the transfer of the district’s most popular principal. She was pulled out of the school where everyone loved her and transferred to Eastview, over her and others’ objections. Her old position was handed to the wife of the district’s business manager. Eastview was subsequently closed, and that wonderful, popular principal is looking for a job. This kind of conduct is intolerable, and Peter has to do some heavy-duty explaining. The community is up in arms, and heads are going to roll soon. The heads that roll will not be the parents or the students, unless those students are unlucky enough to be on the wrong bus.
