Speaking of DISD, this NBC 5 story is one of the most insane things I’ve ever seen. They tease the story by saying they talked to Jennifer Sprague exclusively! They promise she’ll explain “the real reason” she stepped down as the district’s communication’s chief. That reason? Sprague says: “Career-wise, Dallas ISD is not the place for me.”
What the what?
First of all, Sprague more than doubled her salary when she moved here from Colorado Springs with Superintendent Mike Miles, who paid her $185,000 without interviewing anyone else for the job. Career-wise, that’s about as awesome as it gets. Career-wise, Jennifer Sprague was sitting in the fabled catbird’s seat. Career-wise, Jennifer Sprague could go to her 20th high school reunion and pretty much rub her job in everyone’s face. Jennifer Sprague’s “real reason” for stepping down shows how bad she is at her job.
Second of all, what’s up with the “I’m just a regular mom making lunch for my kids in my kitchen with granite countertops” treatment that NBC 5 gave her? So odd.
Third of all, Sprague tells a lie so demonstrably false that it’s mind-blowing that the NBC reporter, Kristi Nelson, didn’t call her on it. Sprague says that she made her decision to step down after reflecting on it over the holidays. Yet the news that she was leaving her post broke on December 21.
Fourth of all, read the column Jim Schutze wrote this week. A taste:
There are horrors that we have come to accept as normal and routine in our city. We spend — no, I spend — lots of energy and ink worrying about whether the right public relations person has been hired to speak about the horrors [in DISD]. Maybe we all need to back off a bit and look at the full picture.
For thousands of children who enter the Dallas school system in kindergarten, the system functions as a direct pipeline to prison. I am not saying it is the school system’s fault that those kids wind up going to prison. But they come in one end as babies. They go out the other end as illiterate convicts.
