I ran into Kevin Skelly, the out-going (meaning he is leaving, not that he is approachable or gregarious, which he also is) PAUSD superintendent at a yogurt shop the other day, and had the opportunity to express my sense of disappointment in his tenure here, and to wish him well. I was actually kinda hoping he would stick around and run for City Council; somebody like him should run. Run, but not hide. And not sell the home front.

So I was disappointed, again, or further, to see this little line in the Weekly, the other day:

3560 Whitsell Ave. K. & C. Skelly to D. Heyler for $2,200,000 on 4/17/14

That sounds like he is leaving.

In today’s Other Paper (we have three, plus an publicly traded -owned online service and maybe two other online sites, plus of course this here Plastic Alto thingy) it says the school board is excited about who is catching the falling knife that had been cutting Mr. Skelly’s hands in recent years, and also reported that as part of Skelly’s package, he received $296, 643 and a $1 million interest-free loan toward purchase of what was, in 2007, perhaps including upgrades by either he, previous owner or one of our eager-beaver residential developers a $1.8 million home, in Barron Park, one of our older and more quaint neighborhoods. (REVEALED: I lived in Barron Park, in a rental, in 2005 and 2006 and still sometimes go to block parties there; and it’s of course near Gunn, my alma mater, where I still sometimes root on home team and organize alumni fritterings)

Skelly, by the way, is not an elitist or an egghead as commenters on main news source sometimes portray him to be. He in a blue-collar Bostonian, perhaps a Southie, like the Matt Damon character in “Good Will Hunting”, and or the Affleck one, and majored in economics and Harvard and played varsity tennis (perhaps with or against Gunn graduates and former Harvard players Tom Savides and Matt Porteus). He has a PhD from our great (perhaps the world’s greatest) public school, University of California, in education.

I had met Skelly several times and had little side-bar discussions with him about this or that and was always (am always, still) impressed by him. Considering that I am merely an alumnus and not a parent — or even a neighbor – he didn’t really have to give me time of day. So when I read about his resignation I wondered what more there is to the story than would be reported in The Weekly. (And I put that in the context of believing, with more authority, that what passes for politics and policy in Palo Alto in recent years, from about 2009 to 2014 at least, although I’ve lived hereabouts off and on since 1974, is not what they teach in high school civics, in my case from Clayton Leo and John Attig, for example, about Democracy and generally not what they print in the Weekly; Or, put another way, how corrupted is our school board and district relative to the flaws in our leadership per se, Council, Commissioners and 250 Hamilton staff?)

I thought about posting on this topic under the too-incendiary title “Kevin Skelly’s grassy knoll” as in: what volley from strange places actually did him in, beyond his supposed failure to act regarding the achievement gap, counseling or bullying?

The Post reports made me do the math: if Skelly sold his house for $2.2 million and put $1.8 million in, he walks away with a $400,000 lagniappe, as they say in Old New Orleans.

He earned it.

(Not sure why I flashed to “Vieux Carre” the place, the Old Quarter, The French Quarter, but will think through how to write a satire on the Tennessee Williams play, which I read at Dartmouth, substituting Kevin Skelly for the Protagonist/Tennessee Williams surrogate, and his wife and kids for the other characters in the play… will edit to add)

edit to add, ten minutes later: I am sticking with “corrupted” but since I am including a reading list with this 700 word essay I will add a link to “The Unwinding” by George Packer (Gunn High class of 1978). The metaphor implies that Democracy is something we need to keep adding energy to, like winding the clock, or it will run down and become…not sure the polite word for it, or am afeared to say it here.

edit again:

I read Henry David Thoreau, at Dartmouth, with, I think, James Melville Cox and upon re-reading 20 years later, I think what his editor but not he called “civil disobedience” is not the rank-and-file marching in the streets and being martyred by smoke-bomb-cannisters sent by the state to their face but engaged citizens with access to leadership demanding that they do a better job of emulating our Founding Fathers Washington Jefferson Adams, Hamilton or step down and let us try. It’s more like Move On than Kent State. Thoreau was expressing his lament that fifty years after 1776 the succession to power was such a come-down from the founders (he was talking about Mexican-American War and indirectly slavery). So “Au Revoir Kevin Skelly Reading List Items 3 is:

edit to add: if he were a Dartmouth guy, I would interpret this as a coded message about beer:

Edit to add, I will check your Cicero and raise you a Zinn, a Hofstadter and

If you are serious about my reading list to contextualize “The Skelly Affair” (or as I call it, “Kevin Skelly and Vieux Carre” because I lacked the guts to call it “Kevin Skelly’s grassy knoll”), do as I did and skim thru Howard Zinn, “A People’s History of the United State”(New York, 1980/2001) and especially chapters 7 thru 9, which I found by glossing Thoreau, chapters with the following titles:

7. “As Long As Grass Grows or Water Runs”

8. “We Take Nothing By Conquest, Thank God”

9. “Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom”

pp. -148- 210, so that’s about 62 pages, which takes me about two hours; it’s a commitment.

It’s roughly chronological, the book is, at least, covering 1492 to current day, or the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Selected citations in these 62 pages, that may or may not shed light (lux et verities) on PAUSD shenanigans: Indian Removal, Andrew Jackson, Louisiana Purchase, California and Texas joining the Union, The American Anti-Slavery Society, Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience”, Mexican-American War(which he calls “Mexican war”), the “Bear Flag Republic”, “the Mexicans forced the American garrison there (Los Angeles) to surrender in September, 1846; Santa Fe, Taos Rebellion, the Civil War, the Underground Railroad, “when Sojourner Truth rose to speak in 1853 at the Fourth National Women’s Rights Convention”,

Ralph Waldo Emerson, not an activist himself, said of the execution of John Brown, “He will make the gallows holy as the cross”,

Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, W.E.B. Dubois “The Gift of Black Folk”, Frederick Douglass,

The Fugitive Slave Act passed in 1850, President Millard Fillmore, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, Harriet Tubman, Robert E. Lee, Stephan Douglas, Horace Greeley, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, Judah Benjamin, President Davis of the Confederacy signed a “Negro Soldier Law”, General William T. Sherman, “Special Field Order No. 15”, President Andrew Johnson, the Fourteenth Amendment repudiated the prewar Dred Scott decision, Fifteenth Amendment, a Civil Rights Act of 1875, the Freedman’s Bureau, Republican Ulysses Grant, Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce, both from Mississippi, Black Reconstruction, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, founder of National Association of Colored Women, American Equal Rights Association, Supreme Court, Supreme Court Justice John Harlan, Plessy v. Ferguson, Rutherford Hayes, Southern Homestead Act, the Compromise of 1877, J.P. Morgan, and Booker T. Washington; selected citations: 7, Dale Van Every, “The Disinherited: The Last Birthright of the American Indian” New York, 1976; 8, Smith, George Winston, Judah, Charles, eds., “Chronicles of the Gringos: The U.S. Army in the Mexican War 1846-1848, Albuquerque, 1966; 8, Aphekar, Herbert, “American Negro Slave Revolts”, New York, 1969; Hofstadter, Richard, “The American Political Tradition” New York, 1973.