Thankful he got out

As a former employee at the Grand Coulee Dam School District (30 years plus), I would like to respond to the article in last week’s Star entitled “High staff turnover this year in GCD school district.” I am now retired from the district, and I have to say that I was so “thankful” to be able to do so when I did and to “get out” of the school district.

I couldn’t agree more with Aaron Derr’s statement: “On several occasions we have formally expressed our concerns about discipline inconsistencies, bullying of other students and staff and not being thoroughly addressed, as well as inconsistency in job expectations from the administration to both the administration and the school board but we have yet to see any formal implementations of changes to help the situation.” WHY, may I ask, does this keep going on? Is the present administration so blind to what is going on that they fail to see? To me it is so sad that this is happening and nothing is being done! The school district used to be such a wonderful place to work, and I am very thankful that I had the opportunity to “put my years in with them,” but the last two that I was employed were not pleasant!

I had some wonderful principals to work with, and some who did not care about anything, and the ones that I worked with who did their job well left because of nothing being done or “no back up!”

I think one of my biggest concerns, though small, was the fact that after 30 years of employment I could not be “trusted” with a “master key” to open all the doors in the “new building!” After that many years, I felt that I should have been trusted enough; after all, I don’t think I would want to sabotage the place that I worked in! Instead, when a circuit breaker would trip or something to that effect, I had no access to the breakers in order to fix the problem; I had to call maintenance to come over from their busy schedule to fix a minor problem!

I was so excited when I heard of the new building and the opportunity to work in it, but I look back now and think the school district should have just remodeled our old buildings and left things the way they were!

This present administration needs to realize what they have in some very valuable employees and learn to appreciate what they do and LET THEM KNOW!

Dave Noggles