According to the Fall River Herald News, former Charlottesville superintendent Scottie Griffin has been named as a finalist for the superintendent of the Fall River school system. There were 21 applications for the position — 12 were interviewed, and 5 remain in the running. Assuming that the Fall River school board and the Herald News are capable of using Google, apparently Griffin’s record doesn’t present a significant obstacle to hiring her.
Fall River has a population of 92,000, and is located along the Massachusetts/Rhode Island border, 50 miles south of Boston. It has two high schools, four middle schools, and 28 elementary schools.
Charlottesville just wrapped up an 11-month-long Scottie Griffin saga, ending by paying her $291,000 to please just go away. Griffin previously applied for a similar position in Arkansas, but the local paper got wise to her, and she was denied the position.
07/13 Update: NBC 29 picked up on the story.
I’m not surprised that she continues to look for another job. I’m surprised, honestly, that she continues to be named a finalist for jobs. Without knowing how things went here, she has held a lot of jobs in a small number of years, that can never really look good on a resume. After reading the article, a few things interest me.
At no point in Charlottesville was she ever referred to as “Scottie Jo Griffin”. In fact, if you do a google search on that name, there is one hit – the minutes of a school board meeting in March 2003 where she was named as a finalist for a job in Florida. Perhaps she wised up a bit after the bid in Arkansas became public and it was all too easy to google her name and get many hits with few, if any, having positive things to say.
The article reads as though she is a) still living in Charlottesville and b) still superintendent in Charlottesville. I’d love to know if that is just bad reporting or the impression they’ve been given.
Perhaps she wised up a bit after the bid in Arkansas became public and it was all too easy to google her name and get many hits with few, if any, having positive things to say.
Funny, that’s exactly what I was thinking. Little does she know that I see all newspaper articles and blog entries that mention Charlottesville. (Well, now she knows. :)
Two things:
Funny, that’s exactly what I was thinking. Little does she know that I see all newspaper articles and blog entries that mention Charlottesville. (Well, now she knows. :)
See, this is where I went wrong. My google news alert is set to email me when her name is mentioned. I set it up at the height of the drama because I was tired of coming to school and not knowing what everyone else was discussing.
Secondly, I was mistaken. That google hit is not when she was named a finalist. She was simply on a list of people who had applied for that job and the board was picking finalists. She was not one of them. A wiser bunch than us, for sure.
I know why she is a finalist. I don’t want to sound like a racists nor a sexists. But when you have a female minority applying for something THAT important, chances are you’re going to be a finalist everytime. I don’t know what is on her resume, but when you hired someone like that, it is like an golden ticket. If she was an white male, I bet she wouldn’t have that much of an consideration.
What I am basically saying is that if her resume was the same as an middle age white male, they will choose her over him NO MATTER what. In today’s world, it is reverse racism. And that is OKAY.
Obviously, somebody needs to drop a dime on her with Fall River…I guess this is one of those times when a little networking would really, really come in handy!
I have emailed the journalist who wrote the article in the Fall River paper as well as two members of their superintendent search committee cited in that article. A little searching on the internet for their email addresses was all it took; I feel that it’s our responsiblity to inform them that information is publicly available on our city’s experience with Scottie Griffin aka Scottie Jo Griffin. I’ve encouraged them to do their homework and spare their city the costly trauma we are going through—all because our own school board failed to do its own research. Whether they’ll be more accountable and competent in the future remains to be seen. In the meantime, why should the students and educators of Fall River have to suffer as we have?
And it looks like somebody there is paying attention.
how the heck did Cville hire this woman?
Hey Violet. I tried to do the same, but without much luck for the city school committee (aka, board). The selection process is down the the school ‘board’… To begin with, none of their, or teachers/admin, email addr are posted on the city’s website. Talk about curtailed lines of communication- perhaps this is the place for Jo Griffin!