By Sylvia Gurinsky
The outrage presented by the grand jury that examined the corruption and incompetence of the Broward School Board and the district's administration is right.
What's not right is a pair of proposals by the grand jury: Five school board members and an elected superintendent.
Currently, the board has seven members elected in single-member districts and two at-large, or countywide, representatives. The system was put in place in 1998. The idea is that at-large representatives, looking out for the entire county, are a check on single-member district representatives, who might put their own area first.
Broward County's population is approaching 2 million. Five school board members wouldn't be nearly enough to deal with the challenges of that population.
If the school board setup needs a tweak, it would be in the direction of more at-large representatives - maybe four to the seven district members.
Totally unacceptable is the idea of an elected superintendent, which would politicize a position that shouldn't be politicized. Just ask the residents of Monroe County, who voted last fall to switch the school superintendent from elected to appointed after a major scandal.
Broward had a top-notch professional educator - Frank Till -as superintendent until not-so-reform-minded board members threw him out and replaced him with yes-man Jim Notter.
There are now a number of new Broward School Board members. They have said they are interested in cleaning things up. They should be given the chance to do so - starting with replacing the incompetent Notter with a stellar education professional. Cleaning up the current system will be far more effective than overturning it.
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