Poor Monica's PowerPoint presentation

As part of the proceedings at Ernie Pyle Middle School last night. Chief Information Officer and Executive Director of Communications Monica Armenta, was called upon to defend the District's progress in meeting the 3rd of their 8 District Goals; Communication.

Although she claims to "sleep very well at night" over what the community receives in exchange for her $107K a year salary, she is clearly defensive about it.

She had to talk so fast to get her accomplishments all listed in her allotted time, Supt Winston Brooks commented on her ability to speak so fast. He credited her years of experience as a talking head in local news.

On the Power Point slides she showed, the poor soul tried to justify her existence by listing apparently, everything she has done in the last few years, item by item.

People in the know, know you can't put more than about a dozen words on a Power Point slide, for a number of good reasons; not the least of which is after awhile they are impossible to read beyond a few feet away, much less across a middle school cafeteria. Even on the handouts depicting the slides, the type size dictated by the volume made the reading tedious at best.

At one point, she announced that her department fields "... an average of between 4 and 40 media inquiries per day." On its face, the statement is mathematically nonsensical. Beyond that, her claim that the media is so interested in APS is undermined by the fact that they don't report on their inquiries at a rate even nearly equal to their reported inquiries.

I point this out only to illustrate a finding of a recent audit of APS' administration which found "... administrative evaluations are subjective and unrelated to promotion or step placement".

You don't actually have to have an awesome skill set to pull down more than $100K per year in APS leadership, you only have to perform well in "subjective" evaluation; we like her, she'll help hide our secrets, let's promote her.

The same is true for all administrators, not just Armenta.




photo Mark Bralley