The best of intentions

Sometimes you mean to do the right thing.
And you end up doing the wrong thing.
Just ask the Jay School Corporation.
Faced with the retirement of longtime Bloomfield Elementary School principal Dan Hoffman, the administration set up a committee involving parents and faculty to help interview his successor.
Trouble is, when Judge Haynes Elementary School principal Trent Paxson moved from that post to his new role as coordinator of middle school and elementary teacher evaluation, no similar action was taken.
Instead, those involved interviewed the top six candidates who had applied for the Bloomfield job, made their selection, then approved another top candidate for the Judge Haynes job.
Bringing the Bloomfield community into the selection of the next principal was the right thing. The elementary school serves a distinct community. It’s rural.
It’s a mix of Amish, Catholic, and other farm families. And it has a high percentage of intact families with both parents on hand.
Good enough, as far as it went.
But there was no equivalent effort to recognize the unique nature of the Judge Haynes Elementary School community.
Judge Haynes also serves a distinct community. It’s small town. It has a significant Hispanic population. More of its families qualify for free or reduced-price lunches because their earnings are lower. And it has a higher percentage of single-parent households.
The two schools could hardly be more different.
Now, it’s important to stipulate that both principals approved this week by the Jay School Board are excellent candidates. The quality of those individuals is beyond question. We believe that both are going on to become excellent principals.
But only one school community had an input on who would be at the helm.
And it wasn’t Judge Haynes.
Was it a coincidence that Bloomfield is the home school of board president Greg Wellman? Probably not.
Wellman, who has been a very even-handed board president, isn’t the kind of guy to go asking for special treatment. But, just the same, the administration knows Bloomfield is close to his heart.
It’s also true, thanks to leadership by Dan Hoffman and John Minch before him and a host of talented faculty members, that Bloomfield holds top rank among Jay County’s elementary schools. It’s been a  Four Star school 12 times, which is a remarkable achievement.
It’s only natural that extra effort and extra care should go into selecting its next principal.
The parents of Judge Haynes students have no gripe with that.
They just wish the same degree of care — and school community involvement — had gone into finding their school’s next leader.
There’s a very good chance that the outcome would have been the same, that Erica Tomano would have been the selection.
But because of the way the process was bungled, no one will ever know for sure.
At Monday’s school board meeting, Wellman urged Judge Haynes parents to give Ms. Tomano a fair chance.
We would urge the same. She is, by all accounts, a dedicated educator.
But it’s not the Judge Haynes parents who have made her transition to her new job a bit more complicated. It’s the administration and the school board. — J.R.[[In-content Ad]]