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Politics & Government

I Would Like to Nominate Two People From the Rockwood Schools as Employees of the Year

2011 was not an easy year for the media relations folks at the Rockwood School District.

PR Nightmare in Rockwood School District: Talk about having a job where you are busy!  Most school district public relations people have to worry that the correct school lunch menu and awards to teachers gets into the local newspapers. It gets really busy if there is a bond issue on the ballot. But stop and think what has been going on in Rockwood over the last five months.

I have to nominate Communications Director Kim Cranston and Media Information Specialist Gina Tarte of the Rockwood School District as the employees of the year. Every Friday before going home for the weekend Cranston and Tarte have to be wondering if another expose about something with the school district is going to appear on the front page of the Sunday Post-Dispatch.   

None of this is the doing of Cranston and Tarte. They just have to deal with mismanagement and gross ethical lapses from others higher up in the pecking order that seems to have been epidemic in 2011.      

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First new superintendent Bruce Borchers hired two friends from his previous job in Minnesota as high paid consultants.  They pocketed $30,000 for 17 days of work.  Rockwood Board of Education members apparently felt that two people completely unfamiliar with Missouri state requirements and standards were the best candidates for the consultant positions.

Then the two consultants were hired by Borchers to high paying full time jobs with the school district pulling down salaries of $138,000 and $125,000. A front page story followed.

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Borchers followed up by holding a special Saturday school district meeting, where residents were not allowed to speak on the record. Instead school board members went out in the crowd and held private conservations with irate taxpayers.

The controversy around hiring the two was enough for Borchers to call off the proposed bond issue for the April 2012 election ballot.   

Then came the Glenn Construction matter. It turned out that Glenn Construction has had the construction management contract with Rockwood since 1992.  In 2004 Glenn Construction hired current school board president Steve Smith as a project manager. Smith told the Post-Dispatch that he did not see a conflict of interest. Of course at school board meetings he would abstain from voting on as many as half the agenda items due to conflict of interests.

When the school district was forced to ask for bids for construction management work, they would simply not open any of the bids and hand out another two-year contract to Glenn Construction. It turned out some of the unopened bids were lower than the contract given to Glenn.

If this was not bad enough it turned out that Glenn Construction’s main office was actually provided rent free in a Rockwood School District building 500 North Central in Eureka. According to Secretary of State corporate annual reports from 2007 through 2011 Glenn claimed the school building as their principal office and the location of corporate officer holders.

During the time Post-Dispatch reporter Elizabeth Holland was preparing a story on all this Glenn Construction filed corrections to their 2011 annual report now claiming their actual address was suddenly 200 S. Kirkwood Road in Kirkwood, Mo.

At about the same time the Eureka-Wildwood-Patch had articles about how the departing Rockwood School District science director Michael Szydlowski was charged in Eureka municipal court with stealing by using a District credit card to purchase items for his personal use. . 

Now in November it was disclosed that Rockwood recently paid a retiring teacher $100,600 for unused sick leave upon retirement. While some school districts allow such payouts, many don’t.

I worked for city and county governments in Missouri and Maryland and everywhere I worked sick days were to be used for sickness or non work related injuries and not as a long term investment vehicle.  I accumulated sick days over the years, but when I left the sick time vanished.  

The nearby Parkway School District has a “use them or lose them” policy for sick days. Anything else is simply a rip off of the taxpayers.    

The sick leave policy resulted in another front page story in a Sunday edition of the Post-Dispatch.        

Add to this a school board member getting disgusted with all the bad news and resigning.

So my nomination for government employees of year has to go to…Kim Cranston and Gina Tarte. I hope in 2012 they catch a break and can focus on students or teachers winning awards plus making the media aware of upcoming high school plays and concerts.

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