There's a fine educational mess in place over at the Champaign school district's Booker T. Washington STEM Academy.
Faculty members have left, leaving long-term substitutes in their place and the students adrift. Ordinarily, one would have to work pretty hard to create a disaster of this proportion, but all it took to ignite the explosion at Booker T. Washington was for adults to act childishly.
Who knows what the future holds? But with the damage done, the only option is to try to rebuild what heretofore was a fully functioning school for nearly 300 students. That appears to be much easier said than done.
Unit 4 Superintendent Shelia Boozer recently confirmed what was widely suspected -- a wave of Boozer-induced resignations has left BTW with no special-education teachers and roughly 20 vacancies building-wide. To stanch the bleeding, Boozer put out an emergency call for volunteers from other schools to move over to BTW for the rest of the semester or school year.
This sad situation is the direct result of the shotgun departures of two school administrators -- former Principal Jaime Roundtree and Assistant Principal Rebecca Ramey. Both are now working in the Rantoul City Schools district.
To say that this situation could have been easily avoided is a dramatic understatement.
The problem began when there was a shooting outside the elementary school in September 2023. Some BTW employees, shaken by the event, took umbrage over Boozer's failure to come to the school to commiserate with parents, faculty and staff and students.
That seems to be a minor oversight on Boozer's part. But according to a federal lawsuit brought against the district, she dramatically overreacted to criticism, particularly when Ramey's wife, a first-grade teacher at BTW, publicly criticized Boozer at a board meeting.
(In a brief statement, Unit 4 "vehemently" denied that claim when it was first made in March, part of a complaint Ramey filed with the state.)
Subsequent events included Boozer informing Ramey she'd be transferred from BTW to another school after serving a five-day unpaid suspension for violating Unit 4's policy on dispensing prescription medicine to students, which Ramey said she did with parental permission.
Ramey, who was very popular with parents and students, was subsequently told she would not be allowed to return to BTW.
What smacked of illegal retaliation is now the subject of a lawsuit.
Circumstances disintegrated from there, mass resignations creating the current dessicated elementary school.
One of the tiresome cliches the public hears from those in charge of the schools is that the students' interests always come first. They certainly didn't in this controversy, and they're paying a fearsome price for questionable behavior by the adults.