CCSD's Inept $2 Million Communications Team

You would like to think that, if a school district spends $2.3 million per year on "Strategy and Communications," as its administrative office is named, it wouldn't need outside help.

Apparently CCSD did. As former principal Jake Rambo discovered after an attempted stonewalling, the district hired a Columbia firm, Chernoff Newman, to quell the outcry over the botched roll-out of a new teacher evaluation system. Perhaps you remember the turmoil stirred more than a year ago when "angered by a new evaluation system that tied teachers' reviews in part to student performance on standardized tests, and in part by a shuffling of about a dozen principals that Superintendent Gerrita Postlewait compared to a CEO shuffling branch managers, [crowds] railed against the district's leadership."

Heads should have rolled in the administration's communications department, but why fire incompetent people? They need jobs, too. Instead, the district called in the cavalry and hid the contract from prying eyes until Rambo's discovery.

"After receiving a tip about the Chernoff Newman contract, Rambo submitted an Oct. 3 Freedom of Information Act request for records of all payments and communications with the company, only to get a response on Nov. 9 that the district did not have any records relevant to his request. He said he found the Dec. 12 payment by chance this month while combing through district budget statements."

Watch out folks.