Goodbye, Tina Smith- and good riddance

If there had been any justice, Tina Smith would have been escorted out of the Memorial Education Building by a police officer on her final day.

After all, she loved showing off her power by having it done to other people,including me,

No matter, she is gone, and that will have to be enough.

Smith climbed the ladder in the Joplin R-8 system, working her way up from human resources director to chief operations officer, not caring how many people's lives were damaged along the way.

My case was the most publicized, since it was the only one in which a public hearing was held, but the same tactics were used time after time. People were threatened to force them to resign. People who left, whether on their own or not, discovered bad things were being said about them to prospective employers.

People who followed the chain of command and reported problems with superiors in the school district found themselves out of jobs, while the ones who were causing the problems suffered no repercussions and often were rewarded.

Smith served as the administration's attack dog, gleefully disrupting the lives of anyone who crossed either former Superintendent C. J. Huff or former Assistant Superintendent Angie Besendorfer.

Only a few remnants of the Huff Administration still remain in the Joplin R-8 School District. We will probably never know just how much damage these people have done with their excesses.

Ironically, C. J. Huff's tagline on all of his e-mail messages was "For the kids." Yet Huff assembled an administrative team whose callous disregard for human decency ensured that the kids were the ones who suffered most.

Goodbye, Tina Smith- and good riddance