It occurred to me the other day after reading of the New London Board of Educations’ decision not to renew Nick Fischers’ contract that anyone who is hired to work in this city and then is stupid enough to go out and buy a house in our fair city is just too stupid to have been hired in the first place which goes to prove that Fischer is not as stupid as some people would have residents believe.
Now I know that Mr. Smarty Pants Nick Fischer with all his degrees, advanced and otherwise, first thought on reading my opening sentence will probably be something like “Boy, is that a run-on sentence or what?” but the truth is that I can write all the run on sentences I want, fill this blog with an excess of grammatical and similar errors, even misspell my own name, but one truth will still remain, maybe more and it is these, them, those.
I am a New Londoner and he is not.
There are certain benefits attached to being a New Londoner and, trust me, those of us who are RNLs take advantage of every single one when necessary and sometimes when not and there are even allowances that we haven’t yet discovered but given time and the right situation… But enough of that.
Other than BOE member Bill Morse and some other malcontents, no one really cares that, under Fischers’ leadership New London High School was rated the most improved high school in the state in terms of student achievement or that Nathan Hale Elementary School has been designated a School of Distinction by Connecticut’s Department of Education.
Nor do we care, as Mike DiMauro points out in his recent column, that the students “…like Fischer… because he is visible. He supports them in their endeavors, athletic and otherwise, far from the stereotype of the administrator in the fancy suit removed from the realism of every day, but versed in "capacity building for the whole student," "building consensus," "developing more high touch messaging strategies" and other varieties of education-speak. That's not Fischer. He's the guy with bleacher butt. He's at all the games, wearing his green and gold. He talks to the kids. You know. The kids. Exactly whom the board should serve first, second and third, well before its whims and whiffs of personality conflicts.”
Here in New London we give real meaning to the belief that the value of education is an important tradition just like fathers chasing their kids around with power tools and truly believe, as Ogden Nash once said "Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long." especially if it threatens to undo years of patronage and interferes with our long-established political process.
What we really care about is perpetuating the good ole boy system and sitting around on our and our friends’ front porches and strumming banjos just like that kid in the movie Deliverance which, by the way, was based on the James Dickey novel of the same name and, even though it wasn’t filmed in Tiger Ridge, Georgia, New London’s sister city, it surely could have been since both have to do with trips into unknown and potentially dangerous territory which true New Londoners are not about to take.
Never have and never will and, frankly, not even the Supreme Court can make us do what the constitution may appear to be saying or what the rest of the world may think the constitution is saying.
Are you following me here?
The truth is that Nick Fischer will never fit in and it has nothing at all to do with his qualifications, experience and other attributes or, as BOE member Peg Curtin was quoted "I think one of the major reasons was that board members felt there was a lack of communication, they felt it wasn't forthcoming." (Personally, I would have thought that the brand-spanking new iPads that each board member received would have helped with that supposed lack of communication but I guess not.)
What it has to do with is that Dr. Fischer has had the audacity to believe, and worse yet, act on his belief that his first commitment is not to the various political leaders of this city but to the children in our school system and to provide them with the best education, training and resources possible under very demanding and political circumstances.
Silly man!
I once suggested to Dr. Fischer that he could possibly improve his chances of staying on as superintendent if only he would be willing to change his name to something more New Londonish. Something like Frank Uggocini. Even if that didn’t work, he could still take pleasure in signing memos and such with FU.
