Losing graciously is not part of Anna Cowin’s makeup.
The school superintendent decided to let Elaine Ferguson stay on as Mascotte Elementary principal after trying unsuccessfully to persuade the School Board to replace her. But Cowin couldn’t do it without a little twist of the knife.
She felt the need to spank the principal, a woman with a doctorate degree and nearly 30 years in education who volunteered to run the poorest school in Lake County. Cowin has said that Ferguson made derogatory remarks about Hispanic students at the school and used them as an excuse for poor performance. Ferguson says that’s not true.
To retain her job, Ferguson must attend anger-management and cultural-diversity seminars. She’ll have to be re-evaluated later in the year. This, after she received a perfect score on her evaluation in March.
“This whole thing is sickening,” Ferguson said minutes after emerging from Cowin’s office recently. “It’s nothing but retribution and vindictiveness all around.”
When the sting subsides, however, Ferguson, 57, will realize that she won this battle. Cowin seldom backs down, and she tried mightily to avoid it in this case.
Ferguson sent an e-mail to School Board members on June 29, detailing how Cowin looked for instances in which Ferguson had failed to perform her job. The effort came after a June 13 meeting in which Ferguson lost her temper and called Cowin “a total idiot.”
The day after the meeting, four supervisors from the district’s maintenance department went to the school to check on work orders, the principal said. She had been asking for months for a cleanup of the campus — where the ambience is that of a prison — but didn’t get results. Cowin said that Ferguson hadn’t submitted orders for anything but minor emergencies.
Now is the time to bury the snarkiness. Ferguson and her staff deserve to get everything they need to improve education at Mascotte.
On Monday, the School Board will meet at Mascotte Elementary, but members won’t be seeing the same campus I described to readers a month ago.
That’s because teams of maintenance workers have been swarming the place. It has been a virtual pressure-wash fest. There’s new carpet in the portables — the filthy, matted, stinking old stuff is gone. Doors that were warped are repaired, and many have been freshly painted. New lighting fixtures have been installed in some portables. Rotting paneling has been replaced, and toilets that just gurgled now flush. It’s about time this stuff was done.
School Board member Jimmy Conner, who said he is ashamed of himself for letting the campus get so run-down, has an item on the agenda to move forward on the proposed $21 million worth of renovations at the school.
“It’s a poor reflection on me. I didn’t realize how bad it was,” Conner said.
Getting this project going is the right thing to do.
Meanwhile, five more portables have been towed onto the campus, for a total of 26. They outnumber the 17 permanent classrooms. On Aug. 4, Ferguson expects to open her school with about 800 children. It was built for 375. Lunch starts at 10:45 a.m. for some kids.
