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Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Boomer with Attitude / News Gorman needs to cut his TV gig
Posted By John Grooms on Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 10:50 AM
CMS Superintendent Peter Gorman must love seeing himself on television. That’s the only reason I can think of for his refusal to cut CMS-TV from the system’s budget in order to save money during our current economic mess. Yesterday, Gorman told the School Board that in addition to already announced cuts, he’s prepared, in a “best case scenario,” to slash 36 jobs (none of which are teacher positions, although he does propose cutting 15 middle-school literacy coaches), end mandatory field trips, cut “mentor pay” for teachers, and fiddle with bus schedules. CMS-TV survived those proposed cuts and would only be eliminated (along with middle-school sports) if and when CMS faces a “worst case scenario” (a shortage of $33.4 million). Local officials in both county government and on the School Board have told us privately that they would like to get rid of CMS-TV and middle-school sports before enduring more classroom cuts. Gorman should listen to them and forget awhile about his boring talk show. As a former CMS parent (until three years ago), I can tell you that CMS-TV is pretty close to worthless, and should have been put out of its misery long before any teacher layoffs were announced. The only times it was useful for my family were the few days when we needed to find out if school had been canceled due to snow – which is something local news channels can handle. Hardly anyone watches CMS-TV, and why should they? The so-called informational segments – largely interviews with Gorman – are little more than PR for the Superintendent and his administrative cohorts, and rarely reveal anything you couldn’t have already picked up, in more concise form, in news reports. I won’t go into the bad lighting and cheesy softball questions on those shows, because whatever they’re spending on them is money thrown out the window anyhow. In a crisis situation such as the one in which CMS now finds itself, common sense dictates that the cheesy TV shows have got to go before anything else in the system is eliminated.
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