Excerpt from "OFF THE RECORD"

Belt Tightening, MCOE Style

by Bruce Anderson

BELT TIGHTENING, MCOE STYLE. Mendocino County Superintendent of Schools Paul Tichinin got a $5k raise on Monday, bringing his annual base pay up to $105,310, lush fringe benefits for him and his family not included. The raise was not only unanimously approved by his seven supine trustees, it was suggested by them! Of course the trustees are also on the edu-gravy train, garnering $150 per meeting, full health and insurance benefits for themselves and their families, plus incidental freebies like paid free travel to the endless conferences "educators" are constantly treating themselves to at public expense. So what's $5k more per year for the top guy?

PUT A VIDEO CAMERA on Tichinin's work day and what you'd have is a reprise of Andy Warhol's famous film of the Empire State Building -- hours of immobilization during which only the light changes. School superintendents are only slightly more animated. They spend the half year they're at their work stations smiling at people, and taking two hours off for lunch -- three hours if it's a "working lunch" -- and smacking up to their alleged supervisors, their bamboozled school boards.

THERE'S NO REASON for the County Office of Education to exist, let alone squander thousands of dollars that should be going directly to classrooms. MCOE is a 19th century anachronism. A hundred years ago the county's teachers were hired by a guy sitting in Ukiah then dispatched on horseback to the county's far flung schools. When the hiring hall function was no longer needed, MCOE began doing what it does to this day -- taking a percentage of the education money that comes to Mendocino County from the state and federal government then passing along what's left to the individual school districts from Covelo to Point Arena. The money should all go directly to the individual school districts in one big hunk for those individual districts to spend as per their individual needs. But it doesn't. Tichinin and Co. get their cut first.

ACCORDING TO THE UKIAH DAILY JOURNAL, Tichinin defended his raise this way: "It's hard when I am at $100,000 a year and Gary Brawley (Ukiah Unified School District Superintendent) is making $107,000 a year and the VP at the College of the Redwoods makes more than I do now."

HARD? As in difficult? Difficult as in envy-inducing? Embarrassment at golf course show and tells? Hmmm. 107k for Brawley, 103k for vice-president Stump at Redwood, but a mere hundred grand plus bennies for orphan child Paul. We've got to do something! No human being can endure this kind of humiliation! How would you like to be paid a hundred grand in the same town another educator is pulling down 107 thou? Let's put on our thinking caps here. How can we get justice for Paul? I've got it! How about lowering all three salaries to that of the annual average privately employed Mendolander? $22,000 annually? $33,000 if hubbykins and wifey both work? It's a deal!

THE JOURNAL reported that all of Tichinin's trustees agreed that Tichinin was doing "a great job" and "deserves recognition." And you can be sure that poor little Paul replied, "And you're all doing a great job, too!"

TICHININ is a nice enough guy in a Forrest Gumpish, extraneous, low ability, dull normal kind of way, but he and his mercenary trustees (7 trustees where 5 would do) are simply taking advantage of a public that doesn't have any idea of what they do or what they're supposed to do in a time when teachers are being let go, classrooms are more crowded than ever, and parents are holding bake sales to pay for so called extras like music. The raise is shameful, but in the land of no shame, who's blushing?