BY DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, WEEKEND EDITION, MARCH 18-20, 2016) — OK, off Trump and onto the Chump.

Tucked away during the March 9 meeting of the Pittsfield School Committee (PSC), literally the last item of business prior to executive session, was this agenda item:

“VI, E. Approval of Contract between the Pittsfield School Committee and Kristen Behnke.”

The positioning of next to last served two fiendish purposes:

1. It assured that the few citizens who attended the meeting or those watching on TV would be long gone, so the PSC could commit the crime without any witnesses.
2. It met the technical requirements that the public’s business be done in public. In other words, it assured the matter would go unnoticed, like that tree dropping in a forest crushing a taxpayer’s legs with no one there to hear the screams.

In case you didn’t know, Behnke is the finance director for the Pittsfield Public Schools, which is rather like being the Grease Queen for Goldman Sachs. Behnke makes $97,500.

Your honor, let us rephrase to the past tense: “Behnke made $97,500.”

The PSC, your PSC, presented Behnke with an $8,000 raise, to $105,500, not counting bennies. The PSC, led by the sagging Kathy “Lady Boots” Yon, rewarded Behnke for the magnificent, glorious, superb, awe-inspiring, resplendent job of doing … what is it that she does, aside from “yes’n” the superintendent and taking last year’s budget spreadsheets and adding 10%? The bulk of the reward, THE PLANET has learned, came from Behnke’s great job of DRTB. It should also be noted, according to our beat informant Change, Behnke’s assistant went from $35,000 in 2012 to today’s $64,000. As Change so aptly put it, “In contract negotiations, they tell the cooks and custodians they are broke, but Behnke gets an 8% raise and her assistant gets a 90% raise.”

[ED. NOTE: THE PLANET personally notified Behnke of this column, inviting her to correct any factual errors and further inviting to be a guest on PLANET VALENTI TELEVISION. You will be shocked to know she did not respond, we hear under orders from the superintendent supported by the school committee chairwoman. When the phone didn’t ring, we knew it was Behnke not getting back to us]

To live long and prosper as an employee of the school department, including the gonad-less members of the PSC, one has to master DRBT. Handling DRBT at an elite level requires a near-mystical capacity to overcome backbone. A DRTB disciple must suppress all independent thinking, scuttle any sense of responsibility to taxpayers,  and lay in a good supply of knee pads.

DRTB: We speak of “Don’t Rock the Boat.”

As finance director and business manager, Behnke has taken DRTB to new levels, learning as she has from the absolute master, superintendent Jake “JIV” McCandless. To head business operations for a $110 million enterprise whose product grows ever inferior with each passing semester requires a level of sycophantic floor-scraping far beyond that of a typical butt-swabber. Thus, THE PLANET congratulates Behnke for her huge raise. She’s earned every cent of it in lost credibility.

This comes as no wonder, of course. To attend school committee meetings or to watch them on TV inflicts a level of pain known only to victims of The Spanish Inquisition. To go to the PSC minutes — those sanitized syllables of stupidity, those clap-trapped clauses of codswallop — provides sufficient evidence of malfeasance and dereliction of duty (if one defines duty as the education of young people).

Take the Feb. 10 minutes — Please

Under “COMMUNICATION BY THE CHAIR,” Lady Boots comments on the “Happiness Toolbox,” Reid Middle School’s after-school program, “where students wrote pieces on what they learned from the program on diversity and leadership.” The “Happiness Toolbox.” We kid you not.

And you wonder why kids can’t read, write, do math, or locate Washington, D.C. on a map. THE PLANET wonders if Lady Boots would care to send us some of the writing samples of those brainwashed youngsters? You know that “diversity” in the public schools means political indoctrination, verse and chapter from The Little Red Book of the Looney Left.

The next item under the heading reads this way: “Chair Yon asked her colleagues to e-mail her if they were going to attend the Diversity meeting on February 23.”

Look, you’ve got a failing school department that annually eats up $110 million of public money turning out kids with worthless diplomas, and these kiss-ups navel gaze about “Diversity.”

Then There’s This

1. “PARTICIPATION BY SCHOOL COMMITTEE”

“Joshua Cutler [better known as Grandpa Munster Jr.] commented on some of the events that included the band concert at Williams School, noting there was a wonderful community turnout and a large number of students participated in the band. … He attended Reid’s Multi-Cultural Bridge event and said this program is critical to achieving what the district wants to accomplish and that is fostering greater diversity and cultural awareness.”

Are you beginning to see a pattern here, or do we have to draw you a map?

As a school committeeman, Grandpa Munster Jr. has turned out to be the biggest flop since  New Coca-Cola. Instead of worrying about “greater diversity and cultural awareness” or “Multi-Cultural Bridges,” Gramps, you should be pounding the desk with your shoe asking “Why the f–k are we wasting our time on nonsense? Let’s get f—-n’ real!!!” Then you would insist on taking action: Teachers regaining control of the classrooms, curriculum reform going back to basics, school uniforms and the like. Ah, but to do that, you would have to be a mensch.

Ladies and germs, when we tell you “It’s all over,” THE PLANET is being the biggest optimist that ever took an eye test.

Make no mistake. With these clowns in charge, “IT’S ALL OVER.”

The Comment Line is open. Have a great weekend, everybody!

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“That loss is common would not make / My own less bitter, rather more. / Too common! Never morning wore / To evening, but some heart did break.” — Alfred Lord Tennyson, from “In Memoriam,” (1850).

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.