STFU, Please: Dade B of E Redefines Message (Shaddup!) Via $400,000 Focus Groups

The Dade County Board of Education was distressed that taxpayers felt it wasn’t hearing their voices.  Thus it hired an Atlanta PR firm to reshape and refine its message (STFU!) to something that cost a bit more.

STFU, Please:  Dade B of E Redefines Message (Shaddup!) Via $400,000 Focus Groups

By Robin Ford Wallace

            “What qualities are important in a prospective superintendent of schools for Dade County?” asked the moderator, Brighton Perky of Perky PR and Market Research. 

            “Well, I believe he – or she, of course – should be an able administrator, but also a reasonably well-educated person,” one middle-aged woman spoke up timidly.  “Of course we know it’s the superintendent’s job to manage the system efficiently, but this time, in choosing a leader, we should remember that the main reason for schools is learning. Imparting knowledge --"  

            “Ma’am?” interrupted Perky.  “I wasn’t talking to you.  I was just reading from the questionnaire."

            “But …”
            “You can sit down now.”   

            It was Monday evening, and a group of parents, teachers and community leaders had gathered at the Dade County Board of Education offices on Tradition Lane.  Taxpayers had expressed frustration at the botched rollout of an online survey on the school system’s website that appeared to solicit their input on choosing a new superintendent, but which many had found impossible to open until March 20, when an online message informed them it had closed on March 19. 

The survey actually did time out on March 21, by which time a pack of ravening would-be input-givers had encircled the B of E offices, snouts raised heavenward and fangs dripping, opining brokenly at the moon.

            Furthermore, even when taxpayers were able to access the survey, many had found registration requirements intrusive.  Rather than offering an opportunity for anonymous input, it required a participant’s name, email address and position in the community.  “May we contact your present employer?” it asked.  And:  “Are you the parent of a child in the system we may harass mercilessly in retribution until graduation or dropout date?  Please supply name, grade and known allergies. Bwah-hah.”

“It was a PR nightmare,” Brighton Perky told The Turnip during a lull in Monday’s focus group session.  “So the great minds on the school board applied their tried and true formula:  Shell out obscene amounts of taxpayer money to an Atlanta contractor.  In turn, the contractor agrees to (a) make the problem go away, (b) testify to state authorities that it never existed to begin with, or (c) unilaterally, and for no apparent reason, redraw the county voting districts into aesthetically pleasing, color-coded territories that make little geographical sense but will make voters laugh until they vomit.  In our case, we thought we’d start out with these focus groups and see how much more we can milk – er, where we should go from there.”

The B of E is paying Brighton Perky & Crew $400,000 to conduct these focus group sessions, Perky told The Turnip as participants furrowed their brows over questionnaires they had been asked to fill out.

“A new superintendent should be (a) handsome, (b) smart, (c) honest, (d) a good kisser,” read one sample question.  “Check all that apply.”

“It’s a quiz we copied from a women’s magazine,” confessed Perky.  “ ‘Looking For Mr. Right,’ it’s called.  We could have gotten a new questionnaire designed just for this purpose, but why pay extra?  This is Dade County.  Nobody cares about the writing.”

“Anyway,” he continued.  “The Board of Education is springing for the focus sessions because it’s distressed that the taxpayers feel their voices are not being heard.  That notion has recurred like herpes ever since three packed public hearings in July 2011, when board members sat so still people speculated they had died the night before.  The one exception was the chairwoman, who came out of her trance long enough to read written rules forbidding the board to respond to the public in any way, including blinks, farts or throat clearings.

“And sure enough, the board didn’t twitch an eyelash,” Perky went on.  “Quite a feat considering that the room was filled with teenaged girls who cried, education veterans who gave stirring speeches and angry old ladies who brandished their canes menacingly.  One audience member held a mirror to a board member’s mouth.  Another stuck board members with straight pins.  Nothing.  There was talk of a mass burial.    

“But at the end, one board member came to life long enough to explain to the local press that all budget decisions had already been finalized, and the public hearings had simply been a formality necessitated by state law when the millage rate was raised.

“Those who enjoy funerals were not disappointed, though, because the issue the public was so het up about was the B of E’s decision to murder the local public library, and the next day the then-superintendent accordingly had it whacked.”

One of the men seated at the focus group table raised his hand.  “Mr. Perky?” he said.  “What I think we need is somebody local.  Somebody who understands the Dade community and knows the Dade people.”

“Button it up, little man,” said Perky.  “Can’t you see I’m talking to The Turnip?”

“But I thought the point of a focus group was to let us talk about what we think,” the man protested.

“The purpose of a focus group,” said Perky, “is to collect 400,000 easy clams for my PR company.  You think anybody in Atlanta gives a crap what you hicks out in Hickville have in your hicky little heads?  Now sit down or I’m calling security.”

“But …”

A large, vaguely Italian-looking person, wearing trench coat, fedora and mirror shades, hulked up from the sidelines, placed a large, meatlike hand on the man’s shoulder, and leaned. 

The man sat down.  

Perky laughed.  “Gotta love these Dade County hayseeds,” he told The Turnip.  “Just because 75 cents of their property tax dollar goes to the B of E, they think they have the right to hitch their thumbs behind their overall straps and deliver opinions on how to spend it.”

“They, er, don’t?” asked The Turnip.   

“Hell no,” said Perky.  “If the school board wanted public input they wouldn’t make all major decisions behind closed doors in executive session.  Why would they have gone to the trouble and expense of running for the board unless they get the right to dole out contracts to their brother-in-law and award jobs to the football coach’s wife’s best friend?” 

He snorted.  “Anyway, they’ve got to get while the getting’s good.  Public education is on the way out.  The Georgia legislature is working hard to convince the electorate that teaching the poor to read is a commie idea to begin with.  The only reason the boys in the House put up with education at all is it’s such a golden opportunity to channel taxpayer money to their buds in the business sector.”

“But why hold the focus groups?” asked The Turnip. 

“For the same reason as the survey:  To make it look like they’re paying attention,” said Perky.  “But you think the school board really wants public scrutiny of their hiring decisions?  After some of the wingnuts and Froot Loops they’ve paid top dollar for?  It would be like you asking if those jeans make your butt look fat.”

A man at the end of the table cleared his throat.  “I think …
            Three armed goons materialized from the shadows, wrestled him to the floor and began slamming his head against the tiles.  “Shut the f—k up!” they screamed.

The Turnip retreated, pale, shaken and gazing worriedly at the reflection of its butt in the glass doors.

 In time, though, The Turnip collected itself enough to contact the board of education for input for this story.  Board Chairwoman Carolyn Bradford did not address the specific issue but made the B of E’s standard response:

She dived behind a potted fern.

robinfordwallace@tvn.net

             

Just Off The Truck ... Sex Week In Dade County?

Just Off The Truck….

(News Briefs From The Turnip)

March 6-13 Not To Be Declared Dade County Sex Week

At the regular March meeting of the Dade County Commission on Thursday, Executive Chairman Ted Rumley is not expected to proclaim March 6-13 Dade County Sex Week. 

Thus, festivities will probably not kick off with naked wrestling at the commission meeting itself, and the highlight of the evening is unlikely to be a special one-on-one match between District 1 incumbent Mitchell Smith and challenger Lamar Lowery, who held that post for two terms before being unseated by Smith in the 2010 Republican primary. 

Lowery has now announced he will attempt to win the district back from his usurper, but there is absolutely no reason to suspect he and Smith will grapple for supremacy on Thursday evening while coated in coconut oil but otherwise in a state of glorious and rampant nature.

Nor is there a reasonable basis to believe that the other commission members will attend the Thursday meeting in ladies’ prêt-a-porter hot off the Paris runways, and previously modeled only at a drag revue at the quarterly Methodist Men’s luncheon.

A condom Easter egg hunt in Veterans’ Park has not been scheduled for later in the week, and further festivities do not include an around-the-clock  “Do It In Dade” erotica marathon including segments entitled “Joy in the Morning,” “Afternoon Delight” and “Because the Night Was Made For Loving.”

There are no plans for an “Aphrodisiac Cooking, Dade-Style” class featuring such local faves as Come-Hither potato salad, Magic (Chicken) Fingers and I-Must-Have-You-Now CoolWhip-Jell-O Goop.  Nor will there be a symposium on the erotic potential just waiting to be unleashed in every can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup.     

The county’s human resources director has not requested a slot on the agenda for a lecture on “Choosing the Right Pronoun:  Gender Sensitivity When Employees Return From France.”

And The Turnip would be very much surprised if anybody at all played naked volleyball.   

END

Who Needs TV When We Got East Ridge?

Who Needs TV When We Got East Ridge?  Municipalities Gather For Appreciation Luncheon

By Robin Ford Wallace

            City mayors and councilmen from across the Tri-state area gathered today in Chattanooga for a special “East Ridge Appreciation Luncheon,” featuring dignitaries from that Tennessee municipality as guests of honor.

            “We want the East Ridge city fathers to know how grateful the rest of us are,” said one member of the Chattanooga City Council.  “They make everybody else look like heroes.”

            “Right,” said a council colleague.  “Seems like every time one of our city cops is charged with rape, Tases a nun or beats a cripple to death, East Ridge steps right up to the plate and does something else amusing. ”

            “Takes the heat right off the rest of us,” was the chirpy rejoinder from a northwest Georgia mayor, in whose city a law enforcement officer had recently been charged with supplying his drug habit with evidence from the police evidence room. 

“Who needs us when they got East Ridge?” agreed a municipal maven from Cleveland, Tenn., whose police chief recently resigned after members of his force had their wrists slapped for on-the-clock sex with minors – they wouldn’t have done it if anybody had been sober – and whose personal extramarital trysts, cleverly staged at a storage warehouse fitted up with mattress, brandy and flowers, were captured on security video and featured on local television.  “Remember when they roughed up that fortuneteller lady?”  

He referred to media attention focused on East Ridge in 2010, when the city tried to enforce its ordinance prohibiting use of “supernatural powers” within city limits, shutting down a Tarot-reader’s fortune-telling booth at a local flea market.  The big-earringed practitioner of the Dark Arts fought back, invoking not magic but her First-Amendment rights.  The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against East Ridge and it didn’t take mystical prognostication to predict which way a federal judge called that one.

            Then there was the East Ridge city manager who hired his 19-year lawn boy for a $35,000-per-year municipal administrative position over 70 other candidates, some with master’s degrees, and who disciplined a court clerk for “mishandling” his daughter’s court case.  East Ridge eventually paid the manager $67,000 to go away rather than firing him, which council members feared could make them liable to a lawsuit – an especially troubling prospect since they had recently paid their city attorney a similar sum to take a hike of his own.   

            The attorney had been fired for overcharging the city, improperly squandering taxpayer funds.  Immediately afterward, though, the East Ridge city fathers approved a pay hike for his replacement, who pointed out that East Ridge was, after all, currently being sued by everybody and his brother George for doing one stupid thing or another.  "It's always something coming up,” the attorney was quoted at the time in the Chattanoogan.com.  “We've got 65 lawyers in our firm and 64 of them are working on East Ridge." 

            Most recently, East Ridge made headlines when the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation took up the matter of an ordinance (or ordinances) the city may (or may not) have passed regarding towing service providers.  Ordinance no. 1 seems to promise all the car towing business in East Ridge to three companies, with the caveat they must be owned by different proprietors; but ordinance no. 2 “grandfathers in” two of the three companies, which are owned by only one.

            The TBI must determine which ordinance is the one that was actually passed by East Ridge.  “But what the question boils down to,” laughed one East-Ridge watcher at the luncheon, “is whether the East Ridge gummint is embroiled in a sick, fascistic, un-American cabal with three towing companies or just the two.”

            The issue arose when another towing service operator wished for a piece of the East Ridge action.  The municipal ordinance in effect quashes any attempt at competition with the three (or possibly two) favored companies.   “It doesn’t surprise me that this happened in East Ridge,” the would-be competitor is quoted as saying in The Chattanooga Times Free Press. 

            The city leaders gathered at today’s luncheon weren’t surprised, either, but they certainly were tickled.  “Nice to have state law enforcement investigating somebody else’s town,” said the aforementioned Georgia mayor, one of whose city commissioners had been arrested in 2012 after a GBI analysis had identified saliva from a complainant’s left breast as originating from his pie hole.  “Good old East Ridge.”  

            “With the cheerful way those boys shower taxpayer funds on the unworthy,” said a county government colleague who had accompanied him to the luncheon, “who’s going to notice our board of ed just coughed up $45,000 to get rid of the schools superintendent, when we had vigilantes ready to ride him out on a rail for free, no extra charge for tar and feathers?”

            The East Ridge Appreciation luncheon was a glamorous affair at an upscale Chattanooga eatery where East Ridge dignitaries washed down the bitter pill of public censure with the milk of human kindness as supplied by their grateful colleagues from across the region.  The entrée was roast beef au jus.

            “We thought about serving them Cornish game hens,” said a luncheon organizer. “In the end we ruled out birds, though, on the principle these poor slobs eat plenty of crow already.”

Manson Likely Pick To Head Dade Schools

Nothing is official yet, but sources close to the Dade Board of Education say Charlie Manson looks good to be tapped for Dade's top school administrator.  Board members say Manson, who persuaded members of his youthful "Family to carry out gruesome murders in 1969, is "good with young people."                                                                                      

Manson Rumored Favorite For Dade County Schools Superintendent

By Robin Ford Wallace

With the accelerated retirement of current Dade County Schools Superintendent Shawn Tobin effective immediately, the burning question in Dade has become:  Who will the Board of Education pick next?

Nothing is official yet, but one name that cropped up again and again as The Turnip pressed county officials for speculation was:  Charles Manson.

Objections to Manson’s selection as the next leader of education in Dade seemed overwhelming, in that he is (a) 79 years old, (b) currently incarcerated and (c) an international icon of evil. 

But a source close to the school board said, who spoke on condition of anonymity, commented:  “And that makes Charlie less suitable than Mr. Tobin … how?”

Tobin announced his resignation Jan. 27 in a letter peppered with quotations from Abraham Lincoln, George Patton and Friedrich Nietzsche, respectively an American president, an American general and a German philosopher whose doctrines were bedtime reading for Hitler.

Tobin had announced his departure date as May 1, but the Board of Education at a special meeting on Feb 20 invited the administrator to, as Shakespeare put it, “Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once”; or as a local wit paraphrased, “Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on your way out.”

During Tobin’s three years as the county’s top educator, he banned books at the high school, effectively assassinated the county library and lost the schools hundreds of thousands of dollars in income when his campaign in favor of continuing the educational one-cent sales tax culminated in the revelation he had neglected to put it on the ballot.

“But his fall from grace came about when he suggested rich people pay school taxes,” said The Turnip’s anonymous source.  “We’re forgiving in Dade County but you have to draw the line somewhere.”

The source referred to the B of E’s push, for which Tobin was the front man, to amend a piece of local legislation which exempts citizens over 65 from paying any school real estate taxes on their homes. 

The amendment would have allowed seniors to exempt the first $125,000 of home value from taxation, but blue-haired Lookout Mountain residents arrived at subsequent board meetings by the limo-load to protest that that wasn’t enough.

“If I had to pay school taxes on my Dade mansion, I wouldn’t be able to afford my other one in Bimini,” one protestor commented through his butler.

“But we do support young people in Dade,” a neighbor added.  “Not to educate the little darlings, maybe, but I personally don’t mind paying them to mow the yard and scrub the toilet.”

“We’ve used locals ever since our Mexican died,” her husband chimed in.

As for Tobin’s possible replacement, Charles Manson’s death sentence for high-profile mass murders in California in 1969 was commuted to life imprisonment when the state put a temporary kibosh on capital punishment in the early 1970s.

But sources close to the B of E insist that Dade officials are negotiating with the warden of Corocoran State Prison in the Golden State for Manson’s temporary release to attend a series of job interviews with board members.   

Why should Dade County hire a convicted California resident, whose major claim to fame was brainwashing his followers, the so-called “Manson Family,” into murdering, among others, a pregnant movie star?

“Charlie is very good with young people, and from somewhere else,” explained The Turnip’s anonymous source.  “They hired Tobin on less than that, mostly on the grounds that he talked like a Yankee.” 

Superintendent Tobin, pictured here at a book-banning session in November 2011, will be a tough act to follow, but sources say contenders include some pretty big names -- not only Manson but Kim Jong-un, who made contributions to education similar to Tobin's in his native North Korea. 

 Associate Superintendent Cherie Swader, who has been named interim superintendent, was previously a principal in the Dade system, and seems well thought-of by local teachers and administrators. 

But the Turnip’s source says that’s the kiss of death with the Dade B of E.  “Forget it, honey,” the source told the Turnip.  “They’ll recruit from the prisons before they promote from within.  Hell, they’d sent feelers out to Kim Jong-un before Mr. T had even started packing his carpetbag.”

The source elaborated that proponents of the North Korean dictator have adopted as the slogan for their campaign for hiring him:  “Jong-un for our young’uns!”