FIRE GENE SWEENEY

Once again the ugliness of ignorance reared its head in Michigan City politics. Assistant Superintendant of Schools Gene Sweeney opened his mouth to the local newspaper, the Michigan City News-Dispatch, and singlehandedly united an entire union and most of a community.

Sweeney was quoted as saying that he wouldn't trust his kids to City's teachers, and that he also didn't want to live in the community for that reason. He also went on to say that he sat in meetings with MC teachers and couldn't believe how bad they were. There was also a line where he was supposedly quoting union officials, who said "screw the kids, we're union."

Now as I have posted before Michigan City has some problems in the school system, because the administration has become obsessed with statistics, instead of what is actually best for the kids of Michigan City as a whole. But this goes way past that. This man single-handedly insulted an entire town and all of its citizenry with his comments. These comments are coming from a man who lives in an nearly all white town, the other side of South Bend, and has already been fired from another nearly all-white school district under a cloud of suspicion.

First of all, Michigan City needs to apopt a policy of hiring people who are willing to live in our town. If they aren't willing to live here, we don't need to be paying them the salary of 3 teachers to not have any real investment in Michigan City. What does it tell me when a person doesn't even believe enough in his own management abilities, that he won't even send his kids here? It tells me he only cares about the big paycheck.

Second of all, if you really are interested in making progress, don't run to the newspapers and contradict the actions you have taken, with the words you are speaking. Sweeney spoke of problems in the school, but it is the policies of he and Superintendant Harding, who also does not live in Michigan City, that have caused many of these problems. This staff is only focused on the numbers that come out of the schools, as was evidenced Sweeney's mention of ISTEP scores. Another number that Sweeney did not mention was the suspension/explusion rates of MC, which had exploded to amongst the worst in Indiana, after their shortsighted decesion to close down the Alternative High School. Then combined with that, they forced the school level administration not to suspend or expel students, even in situations that put teachers and students in direct and immenant danger. Of course students are going to suffer when kids who have no reason to be in classrooms, are disrupting the learing of other students, because they know they won't be disiplined for their actions.

There is no doubt in my mind that Michigan City needs an administrative staff for its school system that actually has a vested interest in seeing MCAS succeed, and become a building block for rebuilding an entire community. The first step to that is firing Gene Sweeney, and Ed Harding, and finding people who are actually sold on our community, and want to see it reach its potential.