Revenge of the Do-Nothings
"When you come to a fork in the road, take it." - Yogi BerraBased upon comments to the blog, it appears the Monday quarterbacking armchair analysts are seizing Dr. O’Malley’s and my departures as an opportunity to repudiate everything the Matawan-Aberdeen district has accomplished under his leadership. This party of malcontents never has anything constructive to offer but their baseless criticisms, which are immune to logic and fact. For example, when the school district was facing a $7 million budget shortfall and the Matawan-Aberdeen community hadn’t supported a tax increase since 2001, the do-nothings were opposing steep staff reductions. Did they offer any alternative to close the budget gap? No. To this day, they’re happy to criticize the school board for outsourcing the custodians while ignoring the million dollars it would have cost each year to retain the custodians. Another example is O’Malley’s raise. In 2008, O’Malley negotiated a reasonable compensation package in exchange for the expectation of salary increases once he proved himself. In his first year, O’Malley introduced numerous educational initiatives, made several personnel changes, and produced a budget that actually reduced year-over-year spending and didn’t raise taxes. He asked for a $9,000 raise and got it. People were in an uproar. How could the school board pay a person more than contractually required? How could we reward someone for just one year’s performance? (To be fair, nobody was so upset as to actually attend the school board meeting, just upset enough to complain on this blog.)Well, the following year, O’Malley did more of the same and didn’t get a raise beyond his contract guarantee. Every taxpayer and district parent can see the changes O’Malley has wrought, from special education to legal fees, to writing curriculums, to the academies, to testing and data analysis, to accelerated math curricula, to a renewed focus on college preparation, to safer schools, to restrained tax increases, and so on. Nobody argues that O’Malley would have done more without the raise and we’ll never know if he would have done less. All we do know is that the board was absolutely correct in assuming O’Malley was a flight risk; Edison, New Jersey’s 5th largest school district, recruited O’Malley with a $25,000 salary increase. Once again, what would the malcontents have done to retain and incentivize exceptional talent? Absolutely nothing. Of course, now the malcontents want to argue that the raises were a waste of money because O’Malley is leaving anyways. Nonsense. That’s like saying you should only wear seatbelts prior to certain types of accidents, as if such things could be predicted. The school board did its best, within reason, to encourage O’Malley to do the best job he could and to remain within the district. That’s all the school board could do and it was right to do so.People complained that eliminating the Director of Security position would endanger our children (the same complaint made when the district outsourced custodial services). Instead, our schools continued to become safer. The special education department objected to Mr. Schweitzer’s appointment as Director of Special Services. In fact, the special education department under his direction has improved dramatically and saved the taxpayers more money than it ever had in the district’s history. Out-district placements are decreasing, special ed lawsuits have virtually disappeared, and parental complaints are way down. Our school district is under constant pressure to improve academics and reduce the tax burden but the do-nothings never have a single substantial idea to move our district forward. Instead, their strategy is to complain about everything and then, at that one time when by pure chance they happen to have been right, they can holler to the skies “I told you so”.These do-nothing malcontents are bankrupt of any leadership or accountability. They jeer from the sidelines and cheer when you stumble but they’ll never get off the bench and play ball.