Avossa: Do not take orders from board members
Superintendent says reminder for principals not tied to an incident.
Palm Beach County Schools Superintendent Robert Avossa is reminding principals not to take orders from school board members, pointing out that individual board members don’t have any role in school operations.
In an email last week to the school district’s principals and department heads, Avossa wrote that state law “does not allow board members to direct staff as individuals.”
“If a board member attempts to provide you direction, please inform them of this letter and direc t the inquiry to me,” he wrote.
In an interview, Avossa said that the reminder was not prompted by any specific incident. It’s the first time he’s put the warning in writing, but he said he gave similar direction in a speech last year.
It’s an effort, he said, to avoid a dynamic “that gets us in trouble.”
It was less than two years ago that the actions of an individual Get more news every day about Palm Beach County schools online at the Extra Credit blog. school board member became an issue in one of the school district’s biggest crises in recent history — a weekslong school bus fiasco at the beginning of the 2015-16 school year.
In that case, the botched implementation of new bus-routing software caused mangled and flawed redesigns of hundreds of routes, throwing the busing system into chaos and forcing thousands of children to miss classes or spend hours waiting for buses to take them home.
During a subsequent investigation, district officials who oversaw the botched software implementation blamed then-board