Whether they like him or not, whether they think he’s done a good job or not, and whether they think no one could have been prepared for what happened on 2-14 or not, the question facing Broward County School Board members Tuesday is whether Superintendent Robert Runcie remains the best person to lead the school district and champion its 271,000 public school students in Tallahassee.
In our view, given the community’s deepening divide over Runcie’s stewardship and the chilly reception awaiting him in the Capitol, he is not.
Broward Schools needs a new leader | Editorial
It seems the School Board meets today and there is a vote about keeping him or letting him go. And Broward’s Democratic Party machine must have been measuring the polls and finding him a liability if you get to see an editorial like this.
The Op-Ed goes on to explain he is not a bad man after all but caught by the circumstance of the Marjorie Stoneman Douglass High School Massacre. Yet they go into a description on how Broward Schools have been slipping under his command. And if that is not enough, the Sun-Sentinel editorial board suddenly has developed a bad taste for the use of the Race Card by Runcie’s allies to defend him. That is all the indication you need to detect he is persona non-grata in the county’s politics.
So there is a good chance he will be gone, but my hope is that he is not. I hope his allies put significant pressure on the board to keep him in at least till the next election. Runcie makes for a fin albatross hanging around the neck of Debbie Wasserman Schulz Club for Liberals.
“But Miguel, you don’t care for the school children?” My answer: I don’t live in Broward and elections have consequences.
People argue that there’s been an election since the shooting and board members who supported the superintendent won re-election, which means the community has spoken.
We’d note that the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board endorsed all but one of those board members for re-election, for which we, too, have gotten grief.
We will see what the day brings.
Old Soviet joke: When Khrushchev became the Soviet leader he found two letters from Stalin with instructions to open them when he was in a crisis that threatened his rule. When faced with a failing economy and pressure to resign during the fifties, he opened the first letter. The letter said “blame everything on me.” Khrushchev adopted De-Stalinization and weathered the storm. Later when the Brezhnev faction was pushing for a firmer approach towards the West, Khrushchev opened the second letter, it said “write two letters.”
I think Runcie needs to write two letters.