Taschner: Well you know, it’s interesting because you know, people talked about that a lot and in terms of…transparency, we tried to make the motion very transparent. That this was non-certified CATA staff and that there was also an economic benefit to it. And one of the things that happens when…you have licensed to service professionals, you can bill back through medical access for those services. So…you can recuperate the costs for the services. So that’s…quite a savings…for the district. I can get you an accurate number.
The Times: You stated that the employees were non-certified CATA but they were part of the CATA union, correct?
Taschner: That is correct, they were in the CATA group.
The Times: If they were part of CATA, where do their union fees go?
Taschner: There was confusion about the union fees being associated with tenure. There is no association of those two things. Tenure is a function of time, and satisfactory performance in the school code provided for certified professionals. People that have a Pennsylvania Department of Education certificate…and are functioning and working in a position…exercising that certificate. So I could be…a person, I could be for an example…and this is not any of the people, but I could be…this could be an example of someone who has an elementary ed. degree so they have a PDE certificate but they can’t find a job and so perhaps another school district says we’re looking for a para-professional. And they go and they start to work as a para-professional. Let’s say they do that for three years and they do fine. They don’t get tenure…because they weren’t working as an elementary teacher. That’s not the job they were hired for. So tenure comes as a function of time and satisfactory evaluation for people who have a PDE certificate and they’re actually…they’ve been hired to function under that certificate.
The Times: What does reversing their tenure statuses really mean?
Taschner: You know….the board and the administration have tried to do a couple of things consistently. One, is when we find things that we’re able to…that have not been correct and we know about them…is to…and as soon as we’re able, we can’t always say things immediately, but as soon as we’re able, to communicate them. And then to take at least any action we can to try to rectify it. So when we know something’s been done that shouldn’t have been done, we try to go back and say okay, that shouldn’t have been done, we’re going to try to rectify it. And so I think it was an action to try to say that, that this was done mistakenly, it was done before…any of us were here, and I think maybe with the exception of a couple of people, and we know it, we’re being transparent about it and this is what we’re doing…you know to try to change it, to fix it.
The Times: You and the school board have worked together to be transparent regarding decisions being made, yet many parents and taxpayers felt blindsided by the decision to furlough the mental health specialists. This was not discussed in a committee meeting, which is essentially an open work session to discuss matters before an official vote. I understand the employees need to be notified before it becomes public, but how do you respond to that?
Taschner: You know, it’s…you’re right there is a difficulty associated with some of the decision making in schools, right? Because people would like to have all the information in a certain time frame, you know…and to the extent that you can give it and do give it sometimes that’s a really good thing and when you can’t, people always assume that there’s some ulterior motive for not. But I think again, there was a level of transparency in saying, wait a minute. This did make the public agenda, it was done before the vote…it was on a public agenda before the vote and there was discussion and the board even revised their…temporarily suspended their board comment protocol to allow people who wanted to get up and speak on the matter to do so.
The Times: It does seem as though you and the board are more receptive to hearing the public than the previous administration ever was.
Taschner: There are so many…it is our very careful and planned intention to dramatically change the educational outcomes and opportunities for students in this school district. And that means for all of them. We’re not talking about just having academic opportunities, right? It means music, it means band, it means athletics but to dramatically improve our school district. Not just a little bit, but dramatically improve it. There are many great things happening here that people don’t even know about because it’s been clouded over by some of the negativity. And so we’re continuing to point at that and it’s…you know, it’s not going to be easy.
There was a culture of corruption here that is…we are now trying to walk through. And to say no, we have to change our practice, we have to change what we’re doing and part of that is trying to be very open…and…when we can. We’re not always going to be able to do that. We can’t always give all the notice that people are going to want to have on every issue. I’ll give you an example. One of the things we have tried to do is be very inclusive about the hiring process, right? It would be…it wouldn’t be wrong for any superintendent to go through a process of hiring someone without any large input. But we said wait — let’s try to include a number of people in this process. So you know, for example, we’ve done some interviewing…we took…I took seriously the consideration that I heard from parents…on a couple of the issues and said we’re going to go back out. And we’ve come back and we finished some interviewing and now I have some candidates. So, I sent out an email yesterday to say, we’re going to do some second interviews on Thursday…I would like to give people a week’s notice but I can’t always do that because it spreads the timeline out so much, that I won’t be ready for school! [laughs] You know what I mean? Or that beyond the timeline, we have to get Act 168 forms filled out because all of the hiring laws have changed significantly in the state. And so while we would…we would like to have…the more people we put in the process, the slower it becomes. And sometimes we don’t have that liberty of time. So sometimes, when we’re having to make decisions, we only have a finite window.
And it’s like we started and I said the quicker we make the change, you know, the harder it is for people to understand it. You know, we don’t have enough time to go out in front and say look, this is what we’re going to do and this is why we’re going to do it. And there’s times that we do have that and you can see that…that…you know, that’s…people always would prefer and appreciate that. And we would like to do that too but sometimes we have to say, when we go back to – what’s the first goal? The first goal is children and so that makes us move at a…quicker pace and people are going…there are going to be times, not just this time but there are going to be future times where we have to move quickly and people aren’t going to have as much information. And it’s going to feel…rushed. And we acknowledge that, we try to avoid that but there’s times that we have to do that because it’s in the best interest of the children.
The Times: That’s actually along the lines of another question I have. Regarding Scott Middle School, Mr. Daney was initially the candidate for the assistant principal there. Parents who were a part of the interview process felt mislead when he was instead placed at the 11/12 center of the high school. Why the change?
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