HUNDREDS RALLY IN LORAIN

FOR EDUCATION AND THE KIDS

It started as one man sitting on his lawn chair with a big old sign; it turned out to be hundreds of people lined up on the sidewalk outside of the Frank Jacinto Elementary School on Marshall Ave.

Parents, residents, teachers and students showed up at a rally organized in part by Brian Hazelett. Hazelett, who was supposed to be sitting on his lawn chair, was down graded to a 5 gallon bucket after selling his chair for a bottle or water. Hazelett said today’s rally is all about education and the children. “The main concern that we have is that this Board has no plan to educate our children. We have no idea what we are going to be left with at the start of the school year. We are all just concerned parents and teachers, some teachers who no longer have jobs, we all just want to know what we are going to have. We want a plan, we want some accountability.” Hazelett said he was not surprised about the turn out and the support today. “I’m not surprised, I expected this community to do this. I hope that twice as many people show up before this is over and if we have to come back again I hope twice as many people come to that one. This is a grassroots thing from the community and I hope they will continue to support our children and public education.”

David Flores, a former city councilman, said this is the worst he has seen the school board in the last 23 years. “As a representative of the city of Lorain, a taxpayer, a parent and I also worked for the Board for 23 years and actually this is the worst I have seen it in 23 years of service here. For all the loyalty, the time we put in, all the wage freezes we put in, who gets hurt here, the kids. This situation didn’t happen overnight, this has been going on for years and we have been telling them for years, the numbers don’t add up, you are too top heavy you need to reduce up there.” Flores feels that there are several viable solutions to get out of this mess. “One solution is to get rid of this Board and start fresh; the other is that this Board appoints a Blue Ribbon Commission of citizens, teachers, and a nice mixture of people from the community to look over their books. There are too many things going on that we don’t know about, we have to file freedom of information acts for all the information we want.” Flores said that any credibility that this Board may have had is gone. “The public feeling, the public perception is that they cannot trust this Board. There are some good people up there, I have never dogged them as humans but there are some decisions that they have made bad decisions as a group and now we don’t know where the money is. The other thing is there is a whole lot of executive sessions going on and that tells you that they don’t want to do business in public.”

Ryan Sagert will be a senior this school year and is concerned how things will go once school starts with the smaller staffing. “There are enough fights as it is in the school and now we will have fewer teachers and staff and bigger classrooms, it could be really bad.. I feel that there is a lack of decisive action with this Board, there is a difference in just putting ideas on paper and actually following through.”

Inside during the actual meeting the Board, with a standing room only crowd, only allowed 20 minutes for the public to speak at the beginning and at the end of the meeting, something that did not sit well with the people who turned out to voice their concerns.

In fairness to the Board of Education, I approached Dean Schnurr, Director of Communications for Lorain City Schools, and asked him to speak about the rally and the large turnout. Mr. Schnurr said that could not speak on that issue because he is not “officially the spokesman for the Board.”

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