Correct Spelling and Grammar Should be the Expectation from D181 Administrators

The Learning For All Plan purports to promise increased rigor and acceleration for all D181 students, ensuring their college readiness and real world skills.  Topping that list should be their ability to spell and use correct grammar. If this is the expectation for our students, it should be modeled by the administrators running the Department of Learning.  Sadly, it is not.

This morning, we began reading the material posted on Board Docs for the 9/23/13 board meeting.  We were shocked to find a glaring spelling/grammar mistake in the first line of a one page memo.  (Click to Open Memo.)        

This memo, titled "Special Education Proportionate Share Funds" was prepared by the "Department of Learning."  The "Contacts" (authors) are identified as Kevin Russell, Kurt Schneider, Dawn Benaitis and Christine Igoe.   The first line of the memo states:  "All local educational agencies are required to utilize a portion of there Federal Part B..."      

The word "there" is used incorrectly.  The correct word to use would have been "their."

Call us nit-picky, but is it too much to expect that one page memos signed by all four Department of Learning Administrators -- Schneider, Russell, Igoe and Benaitis -- be carefully reviewed for basic spelling and grammar mistakes before they are released to the D181 community?  With their combined yearly salaries and benefits totaling over $635,000, this kind of sloppiness or lack of knowledge is unacceptable.  (See the D181 Administrators' Salaries page on this blog and the Salary and Benefits report posted on the 9/23/13 Board Docs.)  With four high level administrators (many of whom also have assistants and secretaries) putting their name on the memo, we should expect that all four would have reviewed it prior to its publication and that at least one of them would have caught the mistake.  Why didn't they?

P.S.:  We want to thank the administrator who read this blog post and corrected the spelling/grammar mistake.