Not long ago, I wrote an opinion piece that I called a “cautionary tale” about the Maple Valley school board and Superintendent and WHS grad Ozzie Parks. The following is another similar tale, but it is not cautionary:
It was the fall of 1979 and I was just starting as the new editor of the Albion Evening Recorder, observing a troubled local school district. A teachers’ strike opened the academic year, there were serious threats of looming teacher cutbacks because of declining enrollment and revenue, and the community was fast losing faith in a superintendent who had been hired from Flint Beecher the year before.
One of my first tasks was to begin covering school board meetings personally, at the behest of my publisher. It was there I first got to know and appreciate newcomer Mike Bitar, newly-hired assistant superintendent for finance.
As old friend Tillman Cornelius said, “Mike Bitar is a straight shooter.” He didn’t blow smoke up your backside, he told it like it was, regardless of whether it was positive or negative.
Not long afterward the school board had to lay off 18 teachers to balance the budget, one of them my good friend Fausto Martinez (so I wasn’t happy, either). It was the classic “last hired, first fired” scenario, but Bitar calmly explained that seniority system was the only objective way it could be done.
Then came the need for Albion Public Schools to ask for a millage increase to make ends meet. Its first attempt was met by resounding defeat at the polls by an angry public.
Then the superintendent, James Rynearson, announced he would actively seek a job elsewhere. So the job of trying to sell an unpopular millage request fell squarely on Bitar.
In August of 1980, the millage request lost by a much smaller margin, prompting Bitar to tell me, “I’m disappointed, but not discouraged.”
Not long afterward, Board David President David Farley proposed the school district end its superintendent search and hire Bitar instead. The board was in no mood to continue its troubles and concurred.
So in the fall of 1980, the controversial millage request, pared back slightly by some financial wizardry by Bitar, finally passed, even though opponents cried foul because some Albion College students voted.
It was in the spring of 1981, while I was in Albion Community Hospital with Hodgkins Disease, the board’s secretary, who took blood at the hospital, told me frankly she was shocked at how the school district had turned around. Not long after that there was a magazine article written about Albion’s comeback from a public relations mess that no one seemed to think could be escaped.
Bitar several years later took the superintendency at Battle Creek. Nearly 20 years after that, Albion became the only community in Michigan that had a college, but no high school, which was closed.
From where I sat, the closure was all the result of failed attempts to get blacks, whites and Hispanics to get along and a local economy that suffered the same ravages, on a smaller scale, as Detroit.
But for a few glorious years in the early 1980s, Albion Public Schools had a brief era of good feelings, however short lived.
Sometimes the solution to a conundrum is right under our noses.