Durham schools should have let its superintendent stay and clean up this mess | Opinion

It’s going to take more than the resignation of Dr. Pascal Mubenga to set things right with Durham Public Schools.

The school board chairman called Dr. Mubenga’s resignation “necessary,” presumably not because he was responsible for a devastating fiscal error – the system’s CFO has already resigned because of his culpability – but because Dr. Mubenga waited two months after learning of the error to inform the school board.

That’s unacceptable, but it seems a weak reason to call for the head of the man who oversaw DPS’s shift to remote learning during the pandemic and helped convince Durham voters to support a record-setting $243 million school bond. Mubenga was named Superintendent of the Year in 2020-21 by the Central Carolina Regional Education Service Alliance.

A recent study of the pandemic’s impact on public education by the New York Times stated that while students in most poorer districts and some wealthy districts are further behind than before the pandemic, some poorer districts – Durham singled out among them – are almost back to pre-pandemic levels of learning.

With Mubenga at the helm, DPS also received an $18 million grant from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Given his track record — one that earned him a contract extension in 2022 — it would’ve made sense to let him stay on and oversee a solution to this daunting mess.

Even if it felt heads needed to roll, the board could’ve waited until a solution was reached and buses were rolling — permanently. Instead, the board is paying him more than $300,000 to go away and leave the problem for someone new to come in and try to fix from scratch.

The problem Mubenga’s successor will face is that nearly 2,000 DPS classified employees, spared the initial indignity of having to pay back money they received, now want the raises to be permanent. That’s understandable, because on what planet is it OK to give workers something and then snatch it back, especially when it’s a problem of the administration’s making?

Want to destroy employee morale? Do it like that.

Or like this: Remember the pandemic, when even the person stocking the grocery store shelves with Vienna sausages was celebrated as an “essential worker?”

In the middle of that I went to work at an Amazon warehouse loading trucks. It was a great gig, allowing one to cancel your gym membership and get paid $15 an hour to work out. During 12 months at Amazon, I met people from many countries elated to be making more than minimum wage. After a few months, we received a raise — “hazard pay” is what they called it — to $18.

Some mornings, there was even a Bojangles sausage biscuit for us when we clocked out.

The elation after the pay bump was palpable: two 20-something dudes loading packages onto pallets loudly discussed what color Lamborghinis they were going to get.

Then, the “hazard pay” went away. Not the hazard, mind you — just the pay. And the biscuit. The energy level in that warehouse dissipated, and many thereafter merely trudged through their duties until they quit.

DPS employees who spoke out graphically and angrily at Thursday night’s meeting are trudging through theirs, too — when they show up. They’re threatening to quit, too, because they say the options presented by the board could leave them worse off than before they received the temporary, illusory raises.

“It has been proven…that DPS classified employees are the tail end of the dog,” transportation manager Tammy Phillips told the board, “and now we are left to feel like the pile left behind by that dog.”

Andre Obie, an instructional assistant and football coach at Riverside High, said, “On any given day, I could be asked to change diapers… or restrain a violent student… In January, you promised that our pay would be the same as December’s: mine was $400 short. My mother taught me never to trust a liar and a thief, and you’ve done both.”

Yikes! It’ll take a skilled captain at the helm to guide DPS through this turmoil.

Looks like it had one.

This story was originally published February 12, 2024 at 6:00 AM.