Making its way through the blogosphere today is a post by The Arizona Republic’s Doug MacEachern, a regular Maricopa County critic of TUSD’s Mexican-American studies program.
What’s interesting in MacEachern’s post isn’t his continuing rant against ethnic studies students and teachers, but a quote from TUSD governing board member Michael Hicks:
“I would not have a problem with the Education Department coming in and taking over the darned district. People are leaving here every day. They need to just come in here and fire everybody, including me. We have lost control of the Tucson Unified School District. It’s out of control.”
You can read MacEachern’s entire post here.
This article appears in May 5-11, 2011.
Odd to see this local meme of elected officials being “fired” by some administrative upper hand, such as the recent suggestion (on right wing radio, of course) that the County Administrator fire a County Superviser, now being spread by elected officials themselves.
Noteworthy in this case, however, is that Hicks has the power to bring down the most culpable figure in the TUSD Ethnic Studies fiasco, Superintendent John Pedicone. (At this point, the other two votes are assured.) Hicks could also, of course, just quit. Setting aside how nice it would be if he’d do both of those things, with this remark he’s made it clear he already knows the community would be better off if he did either one.