The Lincoln Log

Arlene Ackerman’s recent pay raise is suspicious to me. Her salary went up as well as her housing allowance. This is the same woman who, when the schools were running out of paper last year, printed over 64,000 fliers to notify every student and their family that she was retaining her position as superintendent of schools. Such notification is something we could find out by opening the Chronicle or watching the evening news.

There wouldn’t even be too much of a problem with the situation if Ackerman were doing a good job. However, she is not. The San Francisco Unified School District is slowly lowering itself into the gutter, and the school board looks at Ackerman as if she’s a holy figure. They say that they gave her the pay raise to keep her from leaving the school district. I say good riddance to bad rubbish. The schools were running out of money, sports and arts programs are suffering, and her income is raised to being over a quarter of a million dollars.

Also, the outgoing school board voted to raise Ackerman’s housing allowance. So she can basically stay in the same house and pocket an extra few thousand dollars for spending on whatever she wants, such as Gucci purses, Tiffany earrings, and accessories for her Porsche, when that money could instead be spent on school necessities. This raises the topic of teachers’ salary.

According to a recent interview with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, “Teachers do the most important work that there is.” Yet they make a pittance compared to Ackerman, whose work is entirely hands-off when it comes to students. All she does is sit around and allocate funds, and she can’t even do that well. Teachers see the students every day. The teachers are the ones who grab the brain of the student and push and poke at it until it shows signs of life. They impart the knowledge that students will take with them for the rest of their lives.

This is why she doesn’t deserve more money. Arlene Ackerman will just sit in her expensive house, with the closest student three miles away, sipping an apple martini and thinking of new ways to waste the money that should be instead going to libraries, drama departments, and athletic programs. That’s all she’s done as our superintendent; don’t expect a change anytime soon.