Updated January 24, 2007

You read the 1/23/2007 Ann Arbor News article by David Jesse, Another Hit For District. We know that you can't blame the school district for not seeing Pfizer making large corporate decisions that might impact them. You can blame them for the major shortfalls, which have nothing to do with Pfizer or anything other than their own hubris and head-in-the-sand mismanagement; shortfalls that force multi-million dollar budget cuts several years in a row. They have spread the cuts over several year to avoid as much public concern as possible: each year the public has only to react to an average of one third of the total $20M+ per year.

Now Liz Margolis is talking about families moving out of town and taking their $9600-from-the-state per head students with them. This of course increases the already projected student population decline over the next 5-10 years. Again, you can't blame the administration for not forecasting Pfizer's employees' students' flight, but you can blame them, with or without Pfizer's woes for lying about the need for the new school, for lying about having the funds to operate a new school of the wrong size, and for destroying 108 acres of Ann Arbor's Greenbelt to do it.

One wonders just how little foresight can be jammed into one school district administration.