Angela Holloway-Payne, who left her native Memphis for a job as a school superintendent in Kansas, told the Hutchinson News of her new post in small town Stafford, “It looks like a great place to be. It seems like Kansas really supports their educators.”
If a murder had been committed in the vicinity in the previous seven years, Holloway-Payne would make a great juror. She apparently has not been reading Kansas newspapers. For the last seven years, in describing the state of public education, Kansas reporters have been using words like “cut” and “slash” more promiscuously than the students in Horror Screenwriting 101.
Holloway-Payne, who is African American, must not be paying much attention to national media either. If she were, she would know courtesy of ESPN’s Jemele Hill that “Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists.” White supremacist Trump carried Stafford County by a whopping 62 points. “I have gotten nothing but wide open arms and support here in Kansas,” said Holloway-Payne, obviously unaware of the county’s high DQ–“deplorable quotient.”
The Hutchinson News also profiles another big city refugee, Chuck Keller, who fled Las Vegas for the cozy confines of Attica USD 511, a district with fewer than 200 students. One reason Keller, a native Kansan, left Las Vegas was the career impact from the many “layoffs and pay cuts in the Clark County School District.” Unlike the slashing and cutting in Kansas over the years, the slashing and cutting educators faced in Las Vegas was real.
Both Keller and Holloway-Payne are impressed with the relative sophistication of Kansas academics. “I’m pretty proud of our academics,” said Keller. Holloway-Payne, reports the Hutchinson News, “thinks schools in Memphis could get ideas from USD 349.” She cites the example of science teacher Mike Cargill, whose students “are trying out different things to figure out how a Third World country can learn to feed itself.”
Kudos too to Mary Clarkin, the reporter for the Hutchinson News, for refusing to believe what the statewide media have been telling her.
