DPS leaders still battling at this late date

NOTE: This is a reprint of my editorial that ran in the Detroit News.

January 16, 2013 at 10:05 am

Telford: At this late stage, Detroit schools' leaders are still in conflict

By John Telford




State-appointed Roy Roberts has control of DPS’ shaky finances. (Clarence Tabb Jr. / The Detroit News)

For many months now, in my board-appointed capacity as interim superintendent of the Detroit Public Schools, I've been working hard to follow a judge's order to collaborate with Emergency Financial Manager Roy Roberts in administering the school district.

Specifically, the judge put me in charge of the academic side of the house and Roberts in charge of the financial side.

Many times, though, I have found it to be extremely difficult to collaborate with an EFM who has continued to regard himself as the supreme — and indeed often the sole — ruler of DPS.

Case in point: On Jan. 9, Roberts wrote a letter to me and DPS board president LaMar Lemmons, which he released to The Detroit News and to all DPS staff, protesting the board's move to appoint five top pro bono administrative staff members to report to me, and to pay them as soon as a judge grants it the power to do so.

The board did this in keeping with a cost-effective reduction of DPS' bloated central-office administration which I had proposed, and also to counter the EFM's directive to top academic administrators already in place to ignore any order from me that he didn't approve.

In his letter, Roberts announced his prompt intent to rescind my volunteer staff's security clearances and to have DPS police escort them from the premises of any DPS property.

On Jan. 10, this newspaper printed part of my response to the EFM's letter. Here's an excerpt: "I think that rather than petulantly threaten to evict my volunteer staff from the premises of a public facility, you need to sit down with board president LaMar Lemmons and reason together like grownups."

Roberts didn't like this response to his letter, and he wrote a response to my response to which I have now duly responded in turn. It would appear that we will continue in this vein as pen pals for some time, but I won't bore readers further with the contents of these contentious missives.

The five currently banished staff members are my prospective chief of staff, Sherry Gay-Dagnogo (a recent candidate for the Legislature), Chief Information Officer Keith Owens (a former editor of the Michigan Chronicle and recent CIO for the Wayne County Treasurer), and former DPS principals Wesley Ganson (senior adjutant), Bob Thomas and Claude Tiller (ombudsmen).

For the past several months, Thomas and Tiller have been doing yeoman, and pro bono, work in the schools. They have mediated and resolved potentially explosive situations, which deputy superintendent Karen Ridgeway or I would have had to deal with. Before they arrived I had responded to literally hundreds of parent and teacher concerns, as had Ridgeway.

The lunatic pace I was keeping probably contributed to my Oct. 4 heart attack.

We Detroiters believed that when we overwhelmingly voted with the rest of the state to repeal the hated emergency manager law on Nov. 6, the war to save the Detroit Public Schools was won. Not yet so — the governor has now approved near-duplicate legislation in unconstitutional contempt for the voters' wishes, even though the new EFM law is advertised as being different from the old law.

One might call a rat a raccoon, but it remains a rat.

If unchallenged, this new law will restore dictatorial power to the EFM, who will then again become an appointee in charge of DPS, and will strip me of my board-designated powers as interim superintendent.

This poses a clear and present endangerment to our now increasingly tenuous democracy. I trust that President Barack Obama and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder are listening.

John Telford is intermediate superintendent of Detroit Public Schools.