Tikkabik

The Mashpee Special Ed Parents Advisory Council, with which Bonnie and I have both been involved from the start, had a busy week. Some of us met on Sunday after a member of the school committee got in touch with us to discuss plans going forward.

This was a couple of weeks after the SEPAC's president and vice president offered a sternly-worded letter to the school committee expressing a vote of "no confidence" in the special education director, Jane Beaudin, citing, among other things, her lack of proper state credentials and various grievances that parents both within and without the SEPAC have made over time.

It was announced mid-week this week, after our little get-together, that Jane was retiring (effective October, though she won't be back for the upcoming school year at all).

On Thursday I attended a meeting between the SEPAC's officers and two of the members of the school committee. And while those committee members made it clear from the start that they couldn't take any direct action, they asked us what help we needed and took copious notes, and assured us that they'd bring our requests to the attention of the superintendent and others in the school administration who could make things happen, which I took to be a positive sign.

At the time the SEPAC officers read the letter, I was, to be frank, a little put off -- not because I disagreed with even a single thing in the letter, which you can read here, but because the letter came as a surprise to me: The contents of that letter weren't presented as a point of order to the rest of us in the SEPAC. I voiced my criticism in that regard, and our president, Heidi, has taken my comments under consideration, so I'm hoping we won't have a repeat in the future.

Regardless of the circumstances, I'm glad to see Jane "retiring." Between the various complaints that special ed parents in our town had about her and a debacle involving the town's loss of Medicaid reimbursement due to administrative bungling, I really don't think there's a lot Jane could have done to restore the trust of the members of our community most affected.

In somewhat related news, it was also announced this week that Jeffrey Dees, the principal of the Quashnet School here in town, is accepting a position as "interim" principal at the Oak Ridge School in nearby Sandwich. James is disappointed that his friend Ben's dad isn't going to be principal when he goes to the Quashnet school in 2008, but Emmeline likes Dees' replacement, Patty DeBoer, and we've had a positive relationship with her so far. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that between these two major changes, we're seeing a new chapter open up in Mashpee schools.