My Sunday column

When asked in what colors his Model Ts would be available, Henry Ford is rumored to have responded “Any color you want as long as it is black.”
A similar answer was given to the masses of Dalton this week. City residents could have any school superintendent they wanted to replace retiring superintendent Orval Porter, as long as that superintendent was Jim Hawkins of Killeen, Texas.
Hawkins will be taking over the position, which taxpayers fund at a handsome rate, in January. He was selected after school board chairman Steve Williams found a bottle bobbing against the side of his swimming pool. Inside the bottle was a slip of paper with the words, “Hire Jim Hawkins of Killeen, Texas, to replace Porter” on it. Intrigued, Williams looked into the matter, liked what he found and quickly got his fellow board members — does anyone even know their names — to sign on. Presto, chango, Dalton has its next school superintendent.
At least, that’s one version of the story floating around.
(Another theory involves the Freemasons, the Trilateral Commission, the Mossad and the assassination of President McKinley, but I find that one a little far fetched.)
What is clear is that the city school board has no interest in the public’s opinion on this matter, nor does it feel any obligation to open the search up in any meaningful way. The drovers know what’s best for the cattle and no amount of bawling by the dumb beasts makes any difference.
Arrogance personified.

•••

On Tuesday, in a bureaucratic Twilight Zone not so far away, our county school board hosted 100 or so folks with a laundry list of questions or complaints about the new high school planned for the northeastern part of the county. The crowd was angry, but school board chairman Tim Trew put them at ease with some funny jokes and then, with the help of his four peers answered each and every question forthrightly and with such apparent honesty and precision that the crowd changed its mind and ended the evening with a series of loud “Huzzahs!” for the school board members.
Just kidding.
Trew dummied up faster than John Gotti in an FBI raid and he and the rest of the board dove behind the skirts of their out-of-town lawyer and sat silently as one local citizen after another wasted their time at the public microphone. They might as well have been talking to those stone monuments on Easter Island.
Whatever you think about the location of the school, whatever you think about how this public relations fiasco has evolved, surely there should be at least one person on that board with the integrity and courage to speak to the public. And don’t give me that “the lawyer said don’t talk garbage.”
You don’t work for the lawyer. He works for you.
You work for all of us taxpaying jerks who live in the county, you know the ones you cuddled up to when running for office.
Arrogance personified.



Jimmy Espy is executive editor of The Daily Citizen