February 10th, 2010 10:45am
Linda Grist Cunningham
Time for a civics lesson: Correspondence sent to school board members is public record. That includes e-mail, snail mail, form letters, hand-written letters, voice mail and napkins.
Union representative Jay Ferraro’s statement that the 250 letters from District 205’s union employees was private correspondence between the letter writers and the board members is just plain wrong. Wrong because it perpetuates the shadow boxing between the union and the superintendent. Wrong because it defies the community’s need for transparency and accuracy. And, wrong because it misrepresents the Illinois Open Meetings Act.
With these letters the school district unions had an opportunity to tell their front line stories and share their feet-on-the-ground solutions. But the pseudo-secrecy and privacy antics undermine any good those letters might have accomplished.
The on-the-record stories and suggestions of 250 school employees could have counted, could have helped heal the growing rifts between the district administration and the employees. The unions were angry when Superintendent LaVonne Sheffield dismissed the letter writing as simply a union campaign leading up to negotiations.Releasing those letters publicly could have refuted the superintendent.
The letters will be released, of course. We filed a Freedom of Information Act request early yesterday. The district has five working days to respond and we expect the letters to be made public no later than next Wednesday. But, they never should have been sealed for board members only — unless the whole scenario has been a well-orchestrated marketing campaign.
February 5th, 2010 09:13am
Linda Grist Cunningham
Last week I said Rockford and its police union ought to have a do-over on the 2006 attitude survey that’s created such a ruckus for more than three years.
The survey was intended to measure the department’s attitudes toward its then-new chief, his policies and various department operations. The results were, to put it mildly, uncomplimentary. So, the city stonewalled with a $20,000 court fight, which it lost. If ever you need an example of inexperienced leadership, help yourself to that one.
The cops were equally recalcitrant, digging in their collective heels, marching up and down East State Street, posting vicious comments to their own 276-6 blog and sharing similar ones on rrstar.com. There were times I wondered when they had time to serve and protect.
The whole thing — on all sides — was an ugly, embarrassing and unproductive time that did not serve the community well. Far too much posturing. Far too much “my way or the highway.” Far too much “I win, you lose” positioning. At the end, the community lost.
But, there might be a glimmer of hope. There are “repairmen” at work, thank goodness. I have heard from some folks on both sides this week, people in positions to make things happen, to take the first steps toward solutions.
I strongly encourage the cops and the city to reach across that three-year-old divide and make a new survey a true partnership. That means agreeing to the questions, to full and transparent release, and to assertive resolution of the results. It means dropping the attitudes.
These are men of big egos, leadership and power. They can make this happen — if they choose. If they do, the community wins. If they don’t, if they insist on the “win-loose” hard line, the conflicts among the police, the city and the community become the foundation for failure.
To the mayor, the chief and the police: Serve and protect. Please.
February 4th, 2010 03:41pm
Linda Grist Cunningham
Be careful what you ask for; you just might get it. Rockford wants to educate its children. It wants them safe. And, it wants its school superintendent up front and instantly available.
You don’t get all that with the go-along-to-get-along folks. You don’t get all that doing the same things in the same ways with the same conversations you’ve had for decades. You need yourself a change agent. So, the Rockford school board went out and hired itself a change agent.
Back in early December I shared with LaVonne Sheffield, Rockford’s relatively new superintendent of schools, my concerns. I wasn’t happy that we were having to interview a public information officer instead of her. It was difficult to get the most routine information from the district.
We shared a couple hours wading through those things, which have been resolved for now — and talking about Rockford’s never-satisfied appetite for touching, criticizing, advising and otherwise demanding the attention of its school superintendent. That only happens in high-profile, usually urban districts under controversial challenges.
The first six months here, Sheffield took the measure of the community, her school district and board, her students, teachers and administrators. And, during that time, this relatively private, sometimes aloof-appearing newcomer wasn’t feeding that insatiable public (and media) appetite.
Result: rumors and allegations that were too often spun from shadows, and a growing drumbeat that called for her removal.
Rockford has been down this path before, though we tend to forget. The vitriol thrown at Ron Epps should have embarrassed all of us. Ditto for Dennis Thompson. We really do not like the change agents who dare to upend the way things have always been.
We act like a rattlesnake with a foot on its back. The tail shakes; the fangs drip. It’s not a pretty thing and it may not end well — for the foot or the fangs.
Epps left. Thompson left. Sheffield? She might, I suppose, but right now she’s doing something neither of them did. She’s come out swinging. She’s taking on the rumors and facing down the shadows.
In this guest column posted today and scheduled to publish later in the week, Sheffield calls out Register Star columnist Ed Wells. The man who stood up to Rockford’s white establishment, who was the driving force behind the discrimination and desegregation lawsuits of the 1990s. Yes, that Ed Wells. Get your facts right, she says, and she’s not backing down.
That’s the change. She’s not backing down. Everyone else did.
February 3rd, 2010 01:25pm
Linda Grist Cunningham
One can’t spend four decades in the newspaper business and not care about words, commas and whether an exclamation point belongs inside or outside the quotation marks.
For writing journalists and English teachers, the rules and the eight parts of speech are as important as the periodical table and algebraic theorums. Well, except for one little thing: Words change. There are no immutables in language. Perfectly good words transform themselves regularly. There’s gay, tubular, rad, sweet, dish. One of my favorite transformations is snafu.
Little did I know when I first used it in a headline some 30 years ago that it was an acronym that used a word I wouldn’t want to say to my mother, much less put in print. Hey, I told what seemed like 300 World War II vets, “I didn’t know. I wasn’t even born then.”
Newspapers and our Web sites serve hundreds of thousands, and we know we need to be consistent in our use of the language. Enter the Associated Press Stylebook. For time oout of mind, the AP Stylebook has been the arbiter of all things words and usage. Even capitalization and punctuation. (Never capitalize pope or president unless the words precede an actual name.)
Sometimes it takes years for a language transformation to make its way into the AP Stylebook. Not this time. Almost as fast as the world of texting changed the way we communication, AP made this ruling for all journalists who share news and information via social media: It’s acceptable in instant-message and texting conventions to remove punctuation and characters, most often vowels, to save time in typing or thumbing in letters.”
Or: Its accptbl in instnt-mss n txtng convntns 2 rmve pnctuatn n chractrs, mst oftn vowls, 2 sav tm typng r thmbng lttrs.
February 2nd, 2010 11:30am
Linda Grist Cunningham
“If a student has problems with articles, prepositions, verb tenses, that’s a problem.”
So says Ann Barrett who directs the English proficiency exam at Waterloo University in Ontario. Her research documents what anyone who works with written words for a living knows: Don’t expect much good grammar, spelling, punctuation and syntax from those under 45 and definitely not from the under-30 crowd.
Three to four decades of teaching “whole language” (you know what I mean even if I can’t spell) instead of phonics, grammar, spelling and syntax rules gave us millions who wouldn’t know what an article or preposition is. And, subjunctive mood? I won’t even bother to explain that one.
So, here we are in the land of social media where texting, Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare ensure we can share our lives in 140 characters, spaces and a map. For that we need no punctuation (takes up a space) and incomplete sentences. We need shorthand like “bcuz,” or better still, “cuz.”
I love the personal, on-task world of social media writing. But, I know that’s not the language of a business plan or letter of recommendation. I chose the language that’s best at the time.
Sadly, not everyone does.
January 29th, 2010 01:48pm
Linda Grist Cunningham
James O’Keefe could use a couple of Statement of Principles workshops. O’Keefe is the so-called “investigative reporter” who posed as a pimp in order to out funding abuses at ACORN. O’Keefe was celebrated far and loud by hard-core conservatives.
“We need more of those kinds of journalists” was the message. O’Keefe took the adulation seriously and this week was arrested on federal charges in Louisiana. I’ll give you the link to the Fox News version of the story. Not even Fox, which helped make O’Keefe a hero, can bring itself to fully exonerate his latest escapade though they try.
In a nutshell, O’Keefe and three buddies posed as telephone technicians and played around with the phones in Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office. O’Keefe, who apparently did the videotaping with his cell phone, explains they weren’t wiretapping or bugging, but, instead were trying to determine why some constituents were having trouble reaching the senator’s office by phone.
Pretending to be someone else is unethical. O’Keefe and others who believe lying about one’s identity is good journalism are cutting it too close to the line on credibility.
Think of it this way: Do you want Register Star reporters pretending to be teachers in order to get into a classroom? Would you feel comfortable if you knew that a Register Star reporter might gain entrance to your office by pretending to be the cable guy, or a sympathetic businessman? How about a reporter who pretends to be just a regular gal at the after-work watering hole, gets you to tell all, and then reports it?
O’Keefe and club think those tactics are OK. Indeed, I have been in the business long enough to remember when “undercover reporters” were praised. No more. We hold journalists to significantly higher, more transparent, standards these days. We expect our staff to identify themselves by name and title. We don’t trespass. We don’t pretend to be someone we are not.
We don’t do our journalism in a culture that the ends justify the means.
That makes it harder to tell stories. After all, if you won’t let me into your office if I am a reporter, but you will let me in if I am the cable guy, why not just pretend to be the cable guy? I’d get the information I wanted, and I could nail you. Just like O’Keefe.
Was it good that O’Keefe’s pretend-to-be-a-pimp exposed the problems within ACORN? It was good the problems were exposed, but there’s no indication that those problems could not have been exposed without resorting to unethical practices.
Might have taken longer to get the story and the facts documented. Wouldn’t have been as glamorous. Might not have gotten him celebrity status. But, it would have gotten the job done the right way and without the taint of entrapment.
Are there times when undercover is the only way? Maybe, and only as a last resort. The catch is, with the O’Keefes of the world, the adrenaline rush of pretense is addictive, and pretty soon, it’s the shortcut of choice.
We’re doing our annual Statement of Principles workshops on Feb. 18 here in the News Tower. Maybe I should invite O’Keefe.
January 28th, 2010 10:15am
Linda Grist Cunningham
We can only hope Rockford Mayor Larry Morrissey and his legal staff headed by Patrick Hayes learned an elephant-sized lesson from this cop survey debacle: Transparency is cheap, smart and effective.
The city finally released the 2006 cop shop attitude survey — after a court order and almost four years of legal cat-skinning in which the city tried to call a poorly worded, ineffectively done questionnaire an “audit.” What a colossal waste of time, money and energy.
And, for what? Nothing. Nothing. I read every word. The results can be headlined with four sentences:
- The chief of police, Chet Epperson, doesn’t communicate well. Duh. He might be a loquacious orator among friends and family, but the chief has zip in the public communication and empathy skills arena. If he’s communicating with cops the way he talks with the Editorial Board, no wonder they say he’s not making his vision clear.
- Some of the deputy chiefs are backstabbers or ineffective. Well, I can’t speak to that, but if it’s not the customary whining from the staff when new bosses and new orders come about, then the city needs to dig deeper.
- 53 percent of 290 cops completed the survey, so the results are borderline in reflecting the department as a whole, although the messages are so similar it’s clear those who did respond are on the same page. We probably can safely assume that the ones who didn’t respond agreed at least a little, were ambivalent or just disinterested. No matter how one argues the percentages, things were bad in the Rockford cop shop back in 2006 when this was done.
- And, this big headline: What’s the department morale now? This thing is four years old. It tells us nothing about today.
Oh, and one more headline: The refusal to release the results of this survey was so patently, stupidly juvenile that I can’t even wrap my head around it.
I’ve watched closely over the past four years as the mayor has transformed his actions on government transparency from a “no one knows anything until I tell it, if I tell it” approach to a sincere willingness to put it all out there. I want to believe that if the decision were being made today on whether to release the cop survey results, Morrissey wouldn’t think twice. He’d hand out copies on the spot.
So, I want to hear him say that, and I want to hear him say he made a mistake — perhaps born of inexperience — and that he should have released the results years ago.
More to the point, I want to hear him and, preferably Epperson, say they’re doing a “do over.” That a new and better, professionally administered and analyzed, staff survey will be done immediately. That the results will be taken seriously and programs will be put in place — and results measured. And, that all of this will be done publicly.
There’s nothing in those survey results that couldn’t have been fixed in 2006. Doing so today will be far more difficult because the us-against-them culture appears to have become bedrock.
The city’s stonewalling and court-going escalated a troubled situation. The cops’ 276-6 war made it worse.
There’s one remaining question: Can this partnership between the chief and his deputies and the cops in the union be saved? After almost four years delay, perhaps not.
Get the new survey done. See what the solutions may be. Reach resolution. Then answer that partnership question. Do it fast. Before Memorial Day.
January 27th, 2010 08:46am
Linda Grist Cunningham
Hanging on my office wall is a framed copy of the Register Star’s front page from Nov. 5, 2008. The lead photo is of president-elect Barrack Obama, his wife and two daughters.
Fourteen months ago — and a time across the divide of before and after. Such hope that night. Few saw but shadows of the economic catastrophe to come.
Rockford entered the Great Recession in May 2007; the rest of the country followed in December ‘07. For the most part, none of us knew we were in trouble back then. It wasn’t until the end of September 2008, just six weeks before Obama’s election, that we raced off the cliff in a roaring financial meltdown that rivals that which preceeded the Great Depression.
The problem with hindsight is that it seems so clear now. When Obama made his acceptance speech and later in January 2009 his official-unofficial report to Congress, he should have been saying “It’s all about the jobs.” Instead, he talked about health care reform. And, he kept talking health care reform as the Rock River Valley’s jobless rate topped 10 percent, then 12, then 15.
Jobs. When one believes one’s job is reasonably safe, one buys a car, or repairs a leaking roof, or goes out to dinner, or takes a vacation. No job. No cash. No spend. Instead, worry.
If we don’t fix our horrendous health care system, we will soon bankrupt ourselves and our children’s children. I get that. But today? It’s all about jobs.
Tonight is Obama’s first State of the Union speech. He misread the country’s greatest need last year. He has one last chance to fix that tonight.
January 26th, 2010 11:01am
Linda Grist Cunningham
During Monday’s Editorial Board, Republican candidate Kirk Dillard backpedaled faster than Lance Armstrong when I did an “excuuuuse me” as he opined that math and science teachers ought to make more money than other teachers.
Dillard had the good graces to blush, and then he re-spun his message to be “local school boards should have the option of paying math and science teachers more if they have to.”
His thinking appears to be this: Math and science teachers are harder to find, so we need to pay more to get them and more still to get good ones. Then, too, he says, it’s really important to have math and science teachers because we need to produce engineers and vocational education graduates for manufacturing jobs.
And, of course, he added, those math and science teachers are more “up” on new technology and the Internet and stuff like that than their liberal arts compatriots.
I grant his points; well, except for the technology thing which is downright dunce-ness. But, did Dillard think the Editorial Board would swallow “math teachers beat English teachers” without pushing back? Did he think our long-standing advocacy for vocational education and for preparing a workforce for our local companies would make us easy marks for his downplaying of the liberal arts?
Actually, I don’t think he thought it through at all. He was trapped by his traditional thinking and doing what generations have done before: Making light of a liberal arts education. If one does not make it with grease under one’s nails, it simply is dismissed as a soft, unnecessary thing.
Dump the arts and music classes. Who needs that puffy stuff? How could a symphony or a novel, or a speech (no matter how soaring) compare with building a bridge or making a screw? How could the Gettysburg Address compare with the “real” work done by the manufacturers who made the Civil War bullets?
Americans have long valued doing it with their hands over doing it with their heads.
Traditionalists figuratively pat the liberal arts on their collective heads. They do not say it, but they mean it: “Be good little boys and girls, now, while the really important boys — and maybe a token girl if she’s exceptionally good — do the real work.” That’s the thoughtless message.
Thoughtless. Perhaps some liberal arts critical thinking skills are in order?
January 22nd, 2010 01:05pm
Linda Grist Cunningham
This week’s January thaw is giving us a good chance to remember what potholes are all about. Just lost a hubcap to one as I was out and about, and I’ve been keeping an eye on several up-and-coming potholes along Spring Brook and Madison that are just about ready to bloom, so to speak.
The freeze-thaw-heave of northern Illinois weather is perfect for pothole incubation. Add the decades of poor road maintenance and repair at the state, local and national levels, and we can pretty much expect a bumper crop of mega holes come the official spring thaw.
I have seen road crews out already around the city, filling in the baby holes, but there’s no way they can keep up with the nursery being birthed by these crumbling roads.
I don’t have a solution, or at least not one any of us can afford. Tossing around blame does nothing constructive because the fault lies with everyone from those who wrote the road specs decades ago to taxpayers who only wanted to pay for street repairs in their own neighborhoods.
It’s going to be a wicked pothole season. Maybe we ought to have a contest: predict when and where the champion will break through. Just an observation on a January afternoon.
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