Imagine that you are on the board of a medium-sized corporation.

The decision is made to hire a new chief executive officer. After the first year with the new CEO, you look at the corporation’s profits and discover that profits are down.

The CEO seems to have a reasonable explanation. So, you decide to give it another year. At the end of year two, you discover that you have lost a significant percentage of your customers, and an unusually large percentage of your best sales people have resigned to take better jobs elsewhere.

Still, you and the rest of the board do nothing. In fact, you vote to extend the CEO’s contract. No one is surprised when the downward trend continues.

What do you expect will happen to your stockholders and customers? Will more salespeople leave?

Anyone would look at this scenario and quickly decide that the CEO and the board need to go. The CEO is not performing, and the board is negligent in their duty to protect the corporation.

What I have described is exactly what has happened to the Rowan Salisbury School System under the leadership of Superintendent Lynn Moody.

The Rowan-Salisbury School Board has done nothing to correct the problems. Many of our students or customers have left the system.

Many of our best teachers or salespeople have either retired or left the system.

Our test scores or profits have been in a steady decline.

The system management continues to offer new distractions to avert our attention. First, we had a digital conversion.

Next was a celebration because a couple of our schools pulled the system out of the continuing failure category. Then, it was the renewal district.

Now, we are preoccupied with the leadership’s plan to redistrict and close neighborhood schools.

How much longer will this be allowed to continue?

If the current school board does not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Moody, then they need to retire and let someone else resolve the problems.

The RSS student population is just as smart as the students in other NC districts. Our teachers are just as well trained and as dedicated as any in the state.

Redistricting and consolidating schools will not solve problems in Rowan-Salisbury Schools. Hiring teachers who are not highly qualified will certainly not solve the problem.

As with the corporation example, it is obvious that new leadership is needed. Maybe it is time to dissolve the corporation. Maybe it’s time for the municipalities within the county to pull out of the consolidated Rowan-Salisbury School System and go back to individual districts.

And, by the way, Mexico is going to pay for the wall.

Karen Lilly-Bowyer is a retired educator who lives in Salisbury.