Khaatim Sherrer El Circulating Letter About Decision to Step Down

I received this early this morning from Khaatim Sherrer El and thought my readers, especially in the Cascade area, should read this. It is Sherrer El's official statement about his decision to step down as chairman of The Atlanta School Board, which was first reported the week of May 22nd (See APS Board Chair Agrees To Step Down in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

Parents you have lost a valuable fighter in the quest for quality education of your children. [According to a report in today's Buckhead Patch, the parents' group Step Up, Step Down, is asking Mr. El to resign at tonight's school board meeting].

Pay attention. This is the most important local election you can participate in, don't get it twisted. Mr. Sherrer El fought for your children but lost to what, in my opinion, was the politics of ambition. Read the words of Mr. Sherrer El.

"Friends,

Despite good work and a lot of courage, my time as chairman of the School Board has been mired by a very public, and much more nefarious behind the scenes, game of tug-of-war with Atlanta's Mayor Kasim Reed. A person, who by the way, I supported heavily in his campaign -- asking my colleagues on the Board to endorse him, hosting community meetings for him in my home and leading his election day strategy in my City Council District. So, we're not strangers.

Sadly, I came home tonight after interviewing candidates for Atlanta's superintendency to hear yet again that this is how this new mayor plans to do things. It starts with taking your cue from a few leaders in the business community and bullying, berating and maligning anyone who gets in your way. There's no debate on the issues or room for the kind of dissension that makes good policy.

In my case, no one ever challenged me on whether I should have spoken out about a wide spread cheating scandal. No one ever challenged me publicly to a debate about the need to drastically improve the district's graduation rate, especially for African American males.

That a bold plan focusing on grade level reading was a bad idea.Or that I was unqualified to deserve the support of a majority of my colleagues. No, instead what the public was fed by this mayor and his powerful friends was a contrived notion that I led an illegal coup d'etat. It was a very artful and intentional misdirection that doesn't acknowledge that the only apolitical bodies -- the state Legislature's lawyers who wrote the bill in question and ultimately a court of law -- found the Mayor's position to be wrong.

A judge concluded, in his Consent Order that was signed by all nine Board members and their attorney's, that the Board "in changing the leadership was lawful and did not violate the 2003 charter." And if how I became the chairman was really the issue, that should have been resolved when me, and the vice chair at that time, both stepped down, and the Board held new elections.

What perplexes me more is that in the Consent Order we agreed that whoever was elected must serve until December 2011, in an attempt to bring stability to the Board's leadership. The truth is that at the center of the School Board's dysfunction are the same special interests who were shamed by my calling out the cover up into the CRCT investigation.

So, what's my point? We can default to that's just politics or we begin to ask tough questions about the cost of politics being abused in this way. The answer is simple. You lose focus on more than 6,000 + children in 58 schools who were shortchanged out of a quality education from a widespread cheating scandal. The reason I can't let this go is because these are the children whose parents cannot afford to send them to a Sylvan Learning Center to get caught up and these are not kids who will stay in school when it's really discovered that they cannot read in the 9th grade.

My time is up and I've already decided to step down as chairman for the good of the school system but look no further than to what's happening to the Atlanta City Council on this pension reform debate -- another one of the mayor's political stepping stone issues where impacts and people really don't matter if you're not in the downtown business district.

Instead of working collaboratively with people who disagree, you attack them publicly to discredit their position. I just hope in the process we don't lose good ideas or good service from smart, consensus building leaders like Council President Ceaser Mitchell for the sake of personal political agendas. This is a slippery slope to the point where the people, you know who our government is supposed to serve, have no voice. I don't know if that's the democracy we should be spreading around the world, let alone be what Atlanta is known for."

Editor's Note: Conservative columnist Shelley Wynter, a former WAOK-1380 AM afternoon drive-time radio show host, is a regular blogger for Cascade Patch. Catch his full blog site and Internet radio program, The Shelley Wynter Show, at http://shelleywyntershow.com.