Enough whining; give Creel a chance

With some notable exceptions, it ain’t very pretty. I don’t know what happens when people get elected to public office or become a public official, but many lose any semblance of common sense. People who would never run their own lives or businesses in a sloppy, careless manner will, in a public position, agree to the most inane of ideas.

I say all of that as a prelude to express here the opposite viewpoint: Sometimes, you have to give government officials a chance to see what they will do before passing judgment.

That’s the case in Barrow County today with school superintendent Wanda Creel. She’s been in Barrow County just a year and in that short time has become the meanest monster that exists in the blogosphere. She’s been called every ugly name one can imagine (Cruella DeCreel?) and blamed for every minor decision being made that relates to the schools. When there was a band bus snafu a few weeks ago, dozens of parents blogged and blamed Creel. With every education story we post to barrowjournal.com, the anti-Creel bloggers crawl out and posts screed and venom, even if the story has nothing to do with the superintendent.

OK, Creel’s a public official and subject to public scrutiny. She’s fair game to take a few hits and maybe she is or isn’t doing a good job. But after just a year, how would we know?

I suspect there’s more to this than meets the eye. Many of the anti-Creel comments appear to come from disgruntled school system employees. All that bellyaching indicates Creel is shaking up the school system, stepping on toes and perhaps holding some people accountable who have never in the past been held to any standard.

If that’s the real situation, then good for her. There is no institution in Barrow County that needs yanking up by the collar for a serious butt-chewing more than the school system.

Yes, the county government is a mess. Yes, some Winder city leaders are inept.

But it’s the school system that’s really holding Barrow County back. For some reason, the Barrow County School System has long embraced academic mediocrity. Being “about average” has — for too many years — been accepted as “good enough” in the minds of many Barrow school leaders and employees.

One hopes that Creel doesn’t feel this way and that some of the flak she’s getting comes from her demanding better academic performance in the classroom.

Take the system’s math program. If Barrow’s math performance were being run as a division of a private business, every math teacher in the system would have been fired. The underachievement in Barrow’s math is below mediocre; it’s embarrassing. Such poor performance by a business division wouldn’t be tolerated in the private sector — it shouldn’t be tolerated in public education, either.

Many of the complaints about Creel indicate that she’s trying to change things. But nowhere is there a stronger resistance to change than in the academic bubble of public schools. Long-time school employees have always done things a certain way and never want change. It’s human nature. Once in a comfort zone, nobody wants to get out.

But things do need to change in the Barrow County School System and that won’t be easy. Nor will it happen overnight. For many years, parents and citizens didn’t know what was happening in their local schools because test score data wasn’t being reported. Problems were swept under the proverbial rug. There are many years of inertia at work in the system from the board of education down to teachers in the classroom.

There is no reason that Barrow County students shouldn’t perform as well, if not better, than their peers in the surrounding area. But they aren’t. So one hopes all the squealing about that “mean ‘ol Wanda Creel” is because she’s trying to shake up the complacency which has defined Barrow’s schools for too long. A good superintendent should be stepping on toes, shooting sacred cows and holding employees to a higher standard. Perhaps — dare we hope — she is introducing the concept of “striving for excellence” as an alternative to “hugging mediocrity.”

If school employees were standing on solid academic ground in their criticism of Creel, that would be one thing. But many are standing in quicksand as academic underachievers. That’s not much of a platform from which to criticize any superintendent.

And then there’s the issue of gender sexism. A man can be tough and outspoken and he’s a “leader.” A woman who is tough and outspoken is a “bitch” in some minds. One has to wonder if Creel isn’t, to some extent, facing that kind of gender-bias. (It’s not 1965 any more.)

If some Barrow school system staffers get their undies in a wad because Creel chewed them out, so what? Schools don’t exist to ego-stroke smug employees; schools exist to educate students. If that means the superintendent has to shake things up, so be it. She’s the boss; here’s a hankie for the whiners.

It’s too early now to judge how the Creel administration will play out. I’m sure she’s made some mistakes (the singing probably needs to go away, she’s not the chorus leader); and God save us, she isn’t a graduate of Winder Barrow High School (“she doesn’t understand how we do things around here!”)
But whatever Creel’s real or perceived shortcomings, you can’t judge a superintendent’s tenure after just one year on the job. That isn’t fair.

On the other hand, if Creel doesn’t show evidence of making strong academic progress in the system after a couple more years, then bring out the anti-Creel banners and I’ll march in the front of the line, too. Barrow’s schools desperately need to change; if Creel can’t do it, then the BOE should find someone who can.

But until she has time to make some needed changes and prove herself one way or another, let’s cut superintendent Creel a little slack.

Enough of the Creel-baiting blog comments; go find someone else to chew on for a while.

Mike Buffington is co-Publisher of the Barrow Journal. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.