Sunday, June 29, 2008

Everett superintendent stepping down in September

One of the main opponents of student free speech in the state of Washington, Everett School District superintendent Carol Whitehead, is retiring at the end of the summer -- four months ahead of schedule.

Whitehead's free speech legacy includes ...
  • Being sued by a pair of students at Everett High School who were unfairly censored;
  • Watching a pair of her high schools' newspapers (Everett and Cascade) head underground because of repressive administrative practices;
  • Suspending and nearly expelling a student for "working on" one of those underground papers and suspending a journalism teacher for allowing it;
  • The tacit endorsement of secret video surveillance on that teacher; and
  • The relocation of the journalism teachers at both Everett and Cascade to another school in the district.

Whitehead said she decided to up the time frame of her retirement from January to September because of a recent threat on her life.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Whitehead is stepping down early as a result of a death threat my eye! She is stepping down because various groups have dug up more dirt on her than you can shake a stick at.

Someone also needs to look into the dubious financial transactions of the district. The Everett School Board is notorious for rubber stamping anything that gets put in front of them.

Also, once Whitehead is gone, we still need to be in fear of her henchmen Molly Ringo (in the human resources dept) and Karst Brandma (King of all things student related). These folks ran the day-to-day operations of squelching student speech, and backing administrators (principal of Everett High over the Kodak) and coming up with the idea to spy on teachers, and will still be there.

Be VERY afraid that the Board will appoint Karst Brandsma to be the pro tem Super, or worse -- actually hire him to be the next super.

Citizens need to make themselves heard with lots of input on the selection of the next Superintendent to make sure another evil cabal doesn't get put in the place of the former, still current one.

Anonymous said...

Having worked in this district, and tried my best to advocate for independent investigations into the Whitehead-Brandsma-videotaping scheme, and now having witnessed the Everett School Board annoint Brandsma as the Interim Superintendent makes me ill. I give up on this district, and I no longer care. That's the saddest resolution to this comedy of errors I can imagine. You win, Dr. Whitehead.

Anonymous said...

I am so happy to see this happen. I only wish that so many people hadn't had to suffer because of her.
The teacher who was suspended because of the underground newspaper was an incredible journalism teacher and now is not allowed to teach journalism and has to retire at the end of this upcoming school year.
I was a student at Cascade High School when this happened and I got my first detention for going to a protest (in our courtyard) against censorship.

Yay for Carol Whitehead retiring =]

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