NCS thumbs its nose at the community

The insolence of the Newark School Board and Superintendent Richards has been the subject of many Advocate reader observations and last night they proved to be on target: NCS machinery thumbed its collective nose at a community clearly telling it to save money, rather than spend an additional $59,000 a year for a PR spin doctor.

Nobody tells King Richards what to do. That is now established as fact. There will never be a better display of a single institution trying to bully taxpayers.

The most serious fault of NCS is, and has been for many years, the inability of the board and administration to listen to, and accommodate the needs of, the people from whom support is needed. With them, it is a one-way street - their way or the highway.

No PR spin merchant is going to fix that. Get a man at the top who cares about the right things, and the community won't need to be ministered to and preached at by a professional mouthpiece.

Such a clear demonstration of Richards' superiority complex may, in the long-run, turn out to be what's best for the community: I think he just nailed whatever support remained for his regime.

So, yes. Bring in the state to administer our schools. It will be better in the near term to just dump what we have and start over. And a bare-bones financial plan that presumably would result from state administration is a good jumping off place to begin rebuilding.

This community desperately needs its schools repaired, and the place to begin is at the top.