A higher standard

A couple of years ago when Eagle Valley was looking for a new superintendent and a new principal, they spent hours doing the search. They met to discuss what they wanted in each candidate. They went over many applications. They narrowed those applications down and when they decided to interview people, they not only interviewed them at the school, but board members also often drove to the districts that these candidates were from to talk to people at those schools about the potential candidate

One of the things they also did when they were weeding out the applicants was to check for misspellings in the applications.

Several applications were disregarded because of misspelled words. One applicant even sent the application to ìEagle Valley, Minnesota.î

If you happened to have read the Eagle Valley School Board principal search story, you may have noticed that there were three misspelled words in the ED post advertisement: ìtranscripsî ìemaiî and ìfuther.î

I am not trying to make anyone look foolish. I may not have noticed them (except for ìemaiî) had it not been for my spell check. I also have the added luxury of people who proofread the things I write to make sure they are error free (although that still happens sometimes).

I know that our school board members work hard to do a good job for our district. But perhaps they need to look at holding everyone within the district up to a higher standard as well. This advertisement with its misspellings could give the impression to potential candidates that a lesser standard is acceptable by Eagle Valley.

We have done ourselves years worth of disservice by not demanding a higher standard.

Maybe it is time that we begin.

I believe this district could be strong and flourish if we stop flailing around talking about what we should or should not do and start actually doing something.

It may start by being as simple as making sure a document that goes out for hundreds of people to see is properly spelled.

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