I just finished reading the Saturday Joplin Globe, which featured coverage of Thursday night's Diamond R-4 Board of Education meeting.
Superintendent Mark Mayo will be around for another two years, according to the article (they had to sew him up quickly since he is in such demand from other school districts). He will receive $70,000 for the 2005-2006 school year and $72,100 for the 2006-2007 school year.
The Globe reported that High School Principal Jim Cummins will receive $55,100, Middle School Administrative Assistant Danny DeWitt $41,080, and Elementary Principal Deanna Yokley $53, 200.
I won't get into a discussion on the relative merits of the administrators, but Mayo's own choice for principal, Cummins, will receive $1,900 more per year than elementary principal Yokley though she has been principal for seven or eight years and Cummins has only completed one year and did not have his administrative degree when he was hired last year.
This certainly opens the board to charges of favortism at the least and sex discrimination at the most.
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State Representative Ed Emery, R-Lamar, joined the battle with Rep. Kevin Wilson, R-Neosho, to see which one can kiss up to new Governor Matt Blunt the most.
In his column in the Wednesday Lamar Democrat, Emery referred to Blunt's State of the State message as "historic in its clarity and vision."
"What a breath of fresh air he provided to the conservative majority," Emery wrote.
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While The Democrat offered page-one space Wednesday to the Dade County Commission budget, yet another meth lab story, and a story telling what township races will be on the April ballot, it has yet to print a story about the arrest of top O'Sullivan Industries official Gary Reed Blankenship on sex charges in Newton County. (Blankenship resigned from O'Sullivan shortly after his arrest.)
The newspaper still has not printed anything about O'Sullivan Chairman of the Board Daniel O'Sullivan resigning...and that was four months ago. Apparently the removal of the last vestiges of the O'Sullivan family from the business Tom O'Sullivan brought to the community 41 years ago is not big enough news to knock a meth lab off page one.
Wednesday's edition did include O'Sullivan Industries' press release on its second quarter results, but that information, though it affects Lamar's biggest employer, was buried on page 8 of the paper, along with a story on Dr. Kay's Magic Show coming to Lamar.