Casey Wardynski, This One Is For You

With teachers being underpaid, schools in need of renovations, and the entire system in bad need of a full scale reform, there's no doubt that money is a tight resource and must be carefully budgeted. 

There are important matters to be handled, and the system should be transparent, of course. Despite whether or not you believe in federal transparency, there's no doubt that a small-scale, public education system has no need to be making monetary deals behind closed doors.

At least that's what it would look like to any educated, or not-paranoid citizen, but not Casey Wardynski.

You see, Casey Wardynski has spent over $150,000.00 on spying on children's Facebook account.

That is a lot of money, and could have been put to any number of important projects, like renovations, or teacher's salaries, or serving food that isn't primarily Class-D meat to the children in your district. Instead he used it to expel children from school on pretenses that these kids should sue over.

Not only that, but he has waltzed around with statements about how this program he has been using, so called "SAFe", has expelled over a dozen children. (Uhm... Yay?) Does he understand that his job is to progress learning, not halt it, and in every situation possible throw out the bad eggs?

Apparently, the Superintendent things he's still in the military fighting enemies of the states and mass-surveillance is a necessary step.

Well, let me go ahead and send out a message to Mr. Wardynski:

Dear Casey Wardynski,

You are not the National Surveillance Agency, you are a superintendent of a school system in Huntsville, Alabama. You have no over-arching power, and your job is to ensure the education of children. It is an important job, and you are currently failing it.

You have spent immense amounts of money on tests to prove how intelligent your students are, and receive more funding. Test more, keep testing, test until the kid's brains are melted onto the desk and are begging for legitimate education.

Education is the most important value to our society, and we should all know this by now. The Next Generation is the most powerful weapon that can ever be wielded. However, Papa Bear, this weapon is not for your hands. They must decide their own way to walk and the decisions that they believe will help make progress, because so far you have failed to do that.

Education is not, not, not memorizing facts and meaningless data, retaking tests over and over to learn their strategy and perfect it to line your pockets, or sit in the back of a classroom, make A's, but intake no true lessons. Education is about learning how to think, how to exist, deciding your own route, taking in the lessons of those before us, and then putting it into action.

You've hammered into children's minds that they are worthless because they are beautiful dolphins that can't climb trees as well as monkeys can. And you are wrong.

So, superintendent, learn your priorities. Spying is not your job, organizing true teaching is your job. Although you made it rudely clear that you believe you somehow are the voice of the people, just remember that you're not.

You had better learn to be, and learn soon, or your job won't be so assured once the kids in HCS's system come back as voters, activists, and the new power.

Sincerely, someone who actually cares about education.

That's all I have for today, but I'll be back again Monday!

"Forcing academics to pay to read the works of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those in elite universities in the First World, but not to the children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable." -Aaron Swartz