Notice to critics: I am going to keep writing about Besendorfer

I have some readers, all anonymous of course, who think that Joplin R-8 Assistant Superintendent Angie Besendorfer's name should rapidly exit this blog, never to be mentioned again, because she submitted her resignation.

I have even had some who tell me they would be happy to give money to the Turner Report and Inside Joplin if I stopped writing about C. J. Huff and Angie Besendorfer and stopped writing "tabloid" stories about the school district, stories which they insist are just opinion and have no basis in fact.

If that is what it takes to get your money, then please keep it and spend it on a clue.

The crime is not that I continue to write about Angie Besendorfer, but that no one else is. The odds are I will be writing about her for years to come because of the lasting financial damage she, with the 7-0 approval of the Joplin R-8 Board of Education, has done to this district.

The "silver lining from a funnel cloud" has left this district with a dangerously low reserve level, which the board's own strategic plan, approved by a 7-0 vote, insists will dwindle even further.

The damage that Angie Besendorfer has done to this school district may improve if the culture of fear employed to rule the district with an iron fist vanishes with her departure, and there is no guarantee that it will since her hand-picked people are manning nearly every post at 32nd and Duquesne.

What won't vanish are the financial problems she is leaving for us with all of the layers of administration and non-teaching jobs she has created, (again with 7-0 votes from the Board of Education), the massive investment in technology, and her elimination of hundreds of valued principals and teachers from the school district.

If you don't want to read about Angie Besendorfer, feel free to read the Joplin Globe or some other publication where the faults of the R-8 School District will rarely, if ever, be examined.

Sadly, I am going to have to keep writing about her.

Call it obsession, and some of you already have, I call it protecting the taxpayers, something that the Joplin R-8 Board of Education should have been doing, even if it meant something besides 7-0 votes.